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Colombiere Retreat, June 20, 2005Colombiere Retreat Barbara: I was very moved by John's talk last night, the reflections that he presented. We all suffer. That is the human experience. There's a wonderful song sung at the Zen template at Ann Arbor. It was written by Nat Needle. Unfortunately I don't have the voice to sing it. "I will sing you the Four Noble Truths"? I don't know if any of you from Ann Arbor know it, do you? Do you know the tune of it? I know the words but not the tune. Reply: The tune, I think, is related to "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain." (Barbara singing) The Four Noble Truths Everybody suffers just like you. You suffer cuz' you grasp and you crave. There's a way out of suffering for good. The way is the eightfold path of peace. Don't believe it 'cuz you read it on a shelf. (group attempts to sing last verse together) I will sing you the four noble truths. So we all suffer. And there is a way out of suffering. The teachings talk about the Three Gates that can lead us to liberation. These are not gates to decreased suffering, they're gates that can lead to liberation. The Gate of suffering or dukha, impermanence and emptiness. Down at Emerald Isle I gave a talk on this and, reading the transcript from that talk, I realized I wanted to give a very different talk about it. So those who were there with me at Emerald Isle, bear with me. It's not the same talk. When I lost my hearing back in 1972, I was suffering. I was angry, furious, asking, "Why me?" I wanted someone to blame. Somehow if I could pinpoint the blame, there was the idea that I could fix the situation, fix the hearing, fix the unpleasantness of not hearing. I spent a decade looking for a way out. Obviously I didn't find one. When I first met Aaron, I finally opened to his presence and said, "OK, what are you here to teach me?" and he said, "You're suffering. Let's start there. Let's look at the nature of the suffering." What he helped me to understand was that there was an object, in this case a non-object, not hearing. Or maybe we could use deafness, the experience of not hearing as the object. The sense touches on an object, and sense consciousness arises. The sense touches on the object of what should be sound, like watching people talking and not hearing. So a sense object of not hearing arose. This is rupa, materiality, the experience of the body. The body will hear things, see things, taste things, touch things, or not. Then nama, mentality; this is the way the mind plays on the object. You all had the experience on Saturday of the other group being there, overlapped with our meal time, and there being talking in the dining room. Rupa, the ear touching sound. Then the thought, "I don't want this." Mentality, mind, nama. There are different conditioned aspects of sound, the way we think it should be and so forth. So what you're hearing is not bare sound but bare sound, rupa, overlaid with all the mind conditioning about sound. There's nothing inherently unpleasant in hearing a sound such as a voice in a dining room. The pleasantness/ unpleasantness depends on the conditions. It depends on expectations. For me, it was the reverse—rather than hearing a sound, it was not hearing a sound, but there's also nothing inherently unpleasant about not hearing a sound. Not hearing is just not hearing. So Aaron helped me to see the nature of the suffering, that it was not about not hearing but about the mind objects that arose about not hearing. "We suffer 'cuz we grasp and we crave." Impermanence plays into this. We've talked in the retreat about watching the arising of feelings. An object arises and we perceive it as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. But things are not inherently pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. They are as they are. It changes. I was swimming today. When I first got into the pool, it was so pleasant. I was swimming laps, the sun was getting lower in the sky, and after about a half hour I started to feel cold. Pleasant changed to unpleasant. Same situation. The experience of pleasant and unpleasant is relative. Let's use the experience of pain, not a huge pain, but minor pain. We experience pain and it's unpleasant. And then as the pain goes away, there's a moment of real pleasantness—"Ah, no pain!" But if there wasn't pain in the first place, that no-pain would be very neutral. We wouldn't be paying much attention to it. It's pleasant because of the contrast. So mind moves back and forth with this. Our feelings are impermanent based on our conditioning, based on the situation. With the deafness, I created a solid object of not hearing, building a lot of stories around it. For me, one story was "Who's to blame"; "How can I fix it?" was another story. There was enormous suffering because I felt if only this would get fixed, if only I could hear, then everything would be fine again. But in this moment there was no hearing. Everything was not fine, it was terrible; I wanted to hear! When I watched people talking to each other, it became worse. I could take a walk in the woods behind my house and there was little suffering because I wasn't expecting to hear anything. There was a minor bit; I would see the leaves blowing on the trees and think, "I can't hear them." But mostly I was absorbed in visual objects. But as soon as I walked into a space where 2 people were talking to each other, so much grasping came up, "What are they saying?" and out of that grasping came suffering. Suffering in itself is not a dharma gate. Suffering is just suffering. Because we suffer we're led to inquire about the nature of suffering, to see deeply. Understanding the nature of our suffering is what can lead us to liberation. If we don't understand the nature of the suffering, we just keep suffering. So the insight has to grow. I'll come back around to that in a moment. We do begin to see that the suffering is based on conditioned objects and that everything is impermanent, everything changes. I remember just a few years into my deafness going to a University of Michigan football game with my husband. He's a big football fan and gets season tickets every year. With 3 boys at home. I didn't go to many games; I'm not a big football fan and there was always a son around who couldn't wait to go with Dad. But sometimes I went to a game with him. That day I watched the game with interest for about an hour though I found it a little bit boring, watching young men running back and forth on the field, batting into each other while people were screaming. Sports fans please excuse my bias! Finally after about an hour, I'd had enough. I decided to meditate so I closed my eyes. And here I was in this absolutely silent stadium with 100,000 fans screaming their heads off! Can you meditate in a stadium with 100,000 people screaming? No hearing—pleasant! Pleasant! Everything changes. We look deeply at the impermanent nature of everything. The Buddha said it succinctly. Whatever has the nature to arise has the nature to cease. The object arises out of conditions. When the conditions are past, it passes away. The deafness seemed permanent. I'm not talking about the deafness as impermanent, although it may well be. Who knows what may happen in the future. But the feelings of unpleasantness about it, they change. The experience of being deaf changes. Everything changes. When we build a story around what's happening, that "poor me" that I think all of you are familiar with, or "how can I fix it," we miss the object itself. To come to the object itself, 3 things are necessary. One, a word that I used earlier in the retreat, viveka. Viveka means seclusion. Viveka, creating quiet. We come to a place of retreat like this, and viveka is one of the grounds of the retreat. We're not at home with all the hectic business of our lives; we're in a somewhat secluded place. And yet it's not total seclusion, it never can be. So the seclusion is based on both the environment and the relationship to it. We choose viveka by not getting caught in what passes us by. John tells a wonderful story. John, your story of being in the cave, finally finding a place of seclusion, yet finding it unsatisfactory, is a perfect example. Would you tell them that story? John: I was in Northern Thailand staying at a temple on the top of a hill outside of Chaing Mai, right next to Chaing Mai University. It was high up on a mountain and half way up the mountain were a couple of huts next to a river. I stayed in one of those huts. But I wished for more seclusion. It was a little busy there. There was a university student who helped to overthrow the Thai government. There was an uprising and the students took over the country for awhile, and then the military squashed it and they were going to persecute the leaders of the rebellion. So students had to flee or they'd be imprisoned. So this student went into the mountains and he was hiding out in caves in the mountains. After being up there for some time, he took a bus to Chaing Mai , visited the temple, and I met him. I was interested in cave-dwelling for more seclusion, more viveka. He told me how wonderful the caves were there, and he asked if I wanted to go back there with him. So I said, "OK, I'll go back with you." So we took a long bus ride, and we came to the end of the bus line, the last village that the bus would stop at, and then we had a long trek up to these mountains where he had stayed in caves. One cave was down by a river and another was set up high in a mountain; that's the one that he recommended that I stay in. He thought it would give perfect seclusion for a retreat. He took me up there. Going into it, it was just like a hole in the rock. You had to stoop down and almost crawl to get into the cave. Once you got inside, there was this big beautiful cave. It had a hole at the top of the cave almost like a skylight so you could see some light coming through. He had built a bench, like a table, in there, a bunk to lie on. He bid me good night. I didn't have a flashlight but I had some little candles. I meditated for awhile, then I wanted to do some reading before I went to sleep. I lit a candle and I was reading a book, and then I heard a scraping sound. I looked down beneath the bunk that I was on, a wooden slat platform, and I saw a snake going underneath the bunk. It was a big boa constrictor, 7 feet long and quite thick. I didn't know that much about snakes but it didn't look like I wanted to get too close to this one! Anyway, when I saw it, my body leapt, just leapt, flew, off of the bunk. There was a staff on the ground and I took the staff to protect myself from the snake. It was looking at me, and I was backing up with the staff. It stayed there for awhile, looking around, and then it went off to a corner of the cave. It was dark outside at this point. I didn't have a flashlight, and it was rocky terrain. There was no way I was going to be able to get out of this cave and go down the mountain down to the river where the student was. I was stuck in the cave for the night, there was no way out. I'm thinking, "I can't sleep, I'm not going to sleep in a cave with a boa constrictor." There was a ledge at the back of the cave that was a little bit higher up that I could kind of look down from, and I said, I'll just meditate all night. I had a packet of 10 or 12 thin candles. So I lit a candle and I put it in front of me and I meditated. I was absolutely still, the cave was still. When that candle burned down, I took another one and lit it. I can say that it was one of the clearest meditations I have ever had because I was just so aware and so present, and scared at the same time. One time the snake came out. I had started to nod off and I heard this scraping sound of the snake again and I woke up. I was again very visual and very aware. I stayed that way the whole night until I saw the rays of the sun come through that hole in the roof. Then I left the cave immediately and went down where the student was and I said, "You know what's up there?" And he said, "What?" And I said, "There's a huge snake in there." He said, "Oh yea, I had seen the tail end of a snake once when I was up there but I never saw the whole thing." It was obvious when the snake came in that that was the snake's home and I was the visitor. I was the intruder. When I went back to Bangkok, eventually on my way back to southern Thailand, I visited the Snake Farm in Bangkok where they have lots of different kinds of snakes. I learned what they are and which ones are really poisonous and which aren't, that kind of thing. This fellow would not have hurt me. He'd go for a rat or small dog, not a human. Barbara: Thank you, John. I don't have any stories about seclusion that are nearly so exciting. So we go off to a cave seeking a place of perfect quiet for meditation, and we never know what we're going to get. It did give you some seclusion, and one-pointedness, but certainly not peace! Seclusion: Quoting the Viveka Sutta, "Don't let the dust of the sensual pull you down." So we must not get lost in the mind and body senses and their objects. But seclusion isn't just about sense desire and objects. We think we have to seclude ourselves from something to allow the mind to quiet. But the object isn't the problem. What we need space with is our relationship to the object. Outer seclusion helps, so as not to have a constant barrage of sensory input, but when I sit in my woods, I see birds, squirrels, occasional deer and raccoons, sun playing through the leaves, rain and lightening. There are sounds, though these deaf ears don't hear them, crickets, bullfrogs, birds, tree leaves in the breeze, thunder, a branch snapping and falling. There's no place to really get away. What stories will I get into with these objects? I heard of a man on retreat in a cabin deep in the woods, by a stream; it was his perfect retreat spot. But he said the stream running over rocks began to sound like it was playing the Star Spangled Banner. It was driving him crazy! After hundreds of repetitions he went out and began to rearrange the stream's rocks, trying to get a different tune. We can never seclude ourselves from all objects. We go on retreat, away from the busyness of work and family life, and we can get caught up in dealing with the insects or the drip of the faucet in our room. I'm not suggesting some seclusion isn't helpful. That's part of the reason we go into silence. But the bigger part is to allow ourselves space to watch the mind and body and not need to respond to other people and situations. No response needed. Just watch! We can watch the object, see the conditioned stories that come, and know them as stories. Then we seclude ourselves from these conditioned stories mind constantly offers about objects, not by forcing them away, but by knowing them as stories and resting in clarity. This is the natural viveka of pure awareness. The ego moves into a delusion of separate things existing that have to be controlled, something that's separate from me that I have to fix, have to grasp or push away. Pure awareness knows Oneness. Mind's "noise" is not about the object, it's about what mind-consciousness does about the object. How dangerous is an 8-foot boa constrictor? John: It's not dangerous to humans, they go after small animals. In one monastery I lived in, a boa constrictor got a small dog… Barbara: So you could have gone to sleep. John: Yea. Well…! Barbara: You could have safely gone to sleep if you had been able to sleep. John: I suppose so… Barbara: At most you would have woken up with him wrapped around your foot. John: I wasn't about to chance it! Barbara: No! You didn't know that he was safe. There was natural fear. But still, it's not about the object, it's about how we relate to the object. So here I am with deafness. How am I going to relate to it? The way I was relating created suffering. Aaron's first question to me was, how can you change your relationship to it? Viveka, seclusion, has many meanings, but for me it wasn't about seclusion of the senses but seclusion from the stories that were coming up as mind objects. I had to learn how to cut off those stories in a skillful way, not denying the stories existed but staying with the primary object of not hearing rather than running into the stories that arose as objects. Not hearing is an object. It's like the moment of sipping from a cup you think has a flavorful tea and coming up empty. That emptiness, then a feeling of loss, then grasping; these were the succession of objects. Then Aaron began to talk about the factors of vitakka and vicara; holding and penetrating. Vitakka is about presence with the object, and vicara, penetrating into the object. The image that's used in the teachings is polishing an urn. If you want to polish it, you've got to hold it. If you don't hold it and you try to polish it, it just moves away. You can't polish it. If you hold it but you don't polish it, the tarnish remains on it. You've got to hold it and go deeply into it. Vitakka and vicara. There can be many different objects to hold. For me at that time, two were simply fear and loss. Not wanting to be present with them, I went off into the stories, "What will happen to me?", "How can I fix it?" and so forth. To let go of those stories meant I had to come back to the direct experiences of fear and loss. The fear was a very natural one that we all share as humans, fear we won't be safe. But it's built on a certain delusion, that there's a separate "I". At some relative level, yes, we can be unsafe, but ultimately, how can we be unsafe? What's going to happen to us? The worst thing that can happen to us is we'll die. But we're going to die anyhow. Everything that takes birth eventually dies. What's going to happen to me? My body is going to decay, the senses are going to decay. Well, if I lived to 100, I probably would be deaf anyhow. Granted, I don't want to be deaf at 25. But the body decays. Death comes. With the deafness I felt vulnerable and out of control. The body was doing something that left me feeling helpless. There's a lot of fear about such helplessness. At some level I understood I've died many times; it's safe to die. The body decays. That's what happens to the body. I can't hold onto it. Trying to hold onto it is suffering. The dying of the hearing faculty is part of that decay. Seeing there was the capacity to let things be as they are and to be with the direct experience of deafness was an enormous revelation to me because I suddenly understood that deafness was just deafness. There was no betrayal in it, no abandonment, no helplessness, no necessary loneliness. They were stories Suddenly there was no problem. All the anger about it, all the fear just dissolved because I was willing to be with the direct experience of no ear, no hearing. And also to be with sadness, with anger. These are direct experiences: anger, sadness, fear. The stories that come up about it, like what will happen to me, what will the future be, these are stories. What will the future be is not a direct experience, it's a story. Uncertainty is a direct experience. I could see how much I was getting into what will the future be as a way of getting out of the very uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty, and yet uncertainty also changes, it's not a fixed experience. If you stay with it long enough, it changes. What is uncertainty? Doubt, that's another one. Not knowing. But we crave stability, we crave certainty, and so we build stories to get away from the unpleasant experience of uncertainty. We don't want to experience fear. Fear is a big one. We create a lot of stories to get away from fear. So this was a very powerful experience for me, to suddenly realize the deafness was not the problem. It's just rupa, the state of the body in that moment. The mind consciousness playing with that state of body was the source of suffering. And I had no choice about the state of the body. I did have a choice about how mind was going to relate to it. Now we jump forward 33 years. There was this accident, a number of injuries including broken bones around the eye, the orbital bones, and the nose top and bottom, and then there was severe bleeding in the left eye and I had what they called a stroke in the right eye, central retinal vein occlusion. There was very poor vision. Here we go again! Suffering, anger, fear. "I'll be blind!" The doctor said I probably would lose the vision in the right eye. They didn't know about the left eye, because they didn't know where the bleeding was coming from. It might heal, it might not, but I probably would be blind in the right eye. For anybody to be blind is frightening. For a deaf person to be blind is terrifying. How will I relate to the world? What will happen to me? All the stories started coming back, and of course there was suffering. I'm happy to say I did learn something in the earlier years. The suffering didn't continue for too long. It took me a couple of weeks to get through all the stories that were coming, to settle myself, watch the whole experience of suffering and to realize, "It will be as it will be. Don't build stories around it, go directly into the experience of fear, go directly into the experience of poor vision, go directly into the anger or sadness. Make space for them, hold them in the heart. Know that experience and see it as impermanent." Here's the Third Dharma Gate, emptiness of self. Don't build a story around, "what will happen to me?" This is simply the outflow of the aggregates. There's certain damage to the face, to the eyes, poor vision. Yes, this is Barbara it's happening to, what I call "me," but know that while this is this present human's experience, it's all just outflow of conditions, and impermanent. However it is today, it's going to change. It may get better, it may get worse. My relationship to it will changes. Everything changes. And there is no solid self creating or experiencing it. After various treatments, they told me there's nothing more they could do at that time. The vision was getting worse. Then I went to a healing center in Brazil. This is a center with a man; Joao, who channels as I do; he channels many healing entities and has an international reputation for pulling off miracles. They did surgery the first day I was there. A week later at the surgery review they said, "Yes, we can save your eyesight." So there had been despair because the week before, the retinal specialist had said, "You're going to blind. There's nothing more we can do." Now the entities were saying, "Yes, we can save your eyesight." Hope! The vision got better. Six weeks went by. I came back from Brazil. The vision went from blindness in the right eye, 20/100 vision, to 20/30. A vast improvement. It was useful vision again. Then the retinal specialist in Ann Arbor said there were irregular blood vessels and he needed to do laser surgery. He did the laser surgery and the vision went back to 20/100. Despair again. Do we get on the roller coaster or not? And what lets us off? I got on it with despair when he said, "There's nothing more we can do," and hope when the entities said, "We can save your vision." Hope and despair; neither of them are in this moment. Hope is just as cruel as despair because it's based on grasping for something in the future. We don't have to hold on to hope in order to work skillfully to heal something that's injured. It doesn't have to come from a place of grasping. Grasping is fear making a contracted effort. Skillful effort that comes from an openhearted place that invites in whatever healing is possible, and knows there's uncertainty, "I don't know how it will be tomorrow," makes space for that uncertainty and just relaxes with it, yet still attends lovingly to distortion. It's been 2 months now, exactly, since the laser surgery, and it's been a very profound teaching for me. The despair came back briefly after the laser surgery. And then I really saw what I was doing and the way I was creating suffering. Poor vision, if that's the way it is, that's the way it is. The suffering is optional. How is the mind going to relate to these conditions of poor vision? The only way I've found that works is to go back into this whole process of viveka, vitakka and vicara. Viveka, seclusion. Backing up from the stories. As soon as I see a story, it's like a red hot coal and if I grab it, it's going to burn me. I'm learning not even to pick it up, but if I pick it up, mindfulness notes that movement and puts it down quickly. Habit energy may pick it up. Wake up! Put it down. Come back to the direct experience. The direct experience is simply of poor vision. It's a constant thing, because every time I look around, things don't look the way the mind says they "should." Then there's contraction. Awareness watches the whole process—eye contact, eye consciousness, seeing, unclear seeing, fear. With vitakka and vicara, holding the fear. Fear is the object, not the vision. Fear is what grabs the attention. Going deeply into the fear and awareness makes space for it, and it's just fear. I've learned not to be afraid of fear. It's just a frequent visitor. Wage no war with it. Don't give it power. Vitakka: holding the object. Vicara: penetrating the object, penetrating fear to understand that it is a conditioned reaction to helplessness, pain and confusion. Knowing this, it no longer becomes so solid. None of us have any certainty in our lives. Everything can change tomorrow. We can't see whether changes are going to be pleasant or unpleasant, and we can't say that the pleasant ones are better and the unpleasant ones are worse. Sometimes we go through unpleasant experiences and in retrospect we look back and see what powerful teachers they've been for us and for others, and that they've been a blessing in disguise. We can't hold on to anything. Everything changes. If we regard suffering - the whole experience of and insight into suffering, the whole experience of impermanence, and finally the way insight leads us into the experience of emptiness of a separate self - if we regard all of this as teacher, it changes everything. There's the ability to open our hearts to our situation. We can't do that when we're contracted with fear. The aspect of impermanence has been one of the most important for me. "Whatever has the nature to arise has the nature to cease and is not me or mine." Yet there is also permanence, the Ground, and practice leads me there too. It sustains me. At the ocean retreat, we were sitting in a big room looking out at the beach and the ocean, the tides coming on and going out, coming in and going out. Sometimes the beach was very wide, sometimes it was narrow. You would walk down the beach at low tide, and wade out quite a ways. The ocean bottom didn't go away, the ocean bottom was there. The water came in and covered it and then exposed it again. The ground remained. It became a very powerful metaphor for me. I became aware that this ocean bottom goes all the way under the ocean and comes up in Europe. It doesn't care what the ocean is doing, it's just there as ground. This experience with my eyes has led me to literally to take refuge in the ground, Ajahn Chah's "one who knows," or as the Native Americans call it, "Grandmother/ Grandfather Awareness." For years I've conceptually understood the statement Aaron makes so often, "That which is aware of fear is not afraid." As I went deeply into fear, I finally began deeply to understand that statement, that right there with fear, not someplace else, but right there with fear, was that which was not afraid. There's no denial of fear, but an acknowledgment of the Buddha nature, that deep ground that knows everything is okay. No matter what the experience, it's okay, it's safe. This isn't a belief, it's based on knowing from experience. It's based on touching that place of "deathless," the "unborn, undying," deeply enough that we know the Ground is unshakeable. Some of you have heard a story from me about John and me in North Carolina by a river, jumping off rocks into a pool below a waterfall. There were big rocks and a sizable waterfall, and then a big pool. The river water rushed down. Fifty yards downstream the river widened so that the water was only hip deep in another 50 yards. He jumped right in. I stood on the rocks looking at it for awhile. Finally I jumped in. The water caught me, spun me around, and because I didn't have any balance in my ears, fear came up. The current was so fast it had already shot me downstream. Aaron said, "Just put your feet down." Of course, as soon as I put my feet down, the water was only 3 feet deep. I stood up. That's been such a major metaphor for me, the reminder the ground is always there; just put your feet down. We forget that the ground is there so we go spinning off into samsara, into fear, into not wanting uncertainty, not wanting discomfort, not wanting confusion or pain. We forget to put our feet down, to touch base with "the one who knows," which is the essence of us. This is not something you come to suddenly with an enlightenment experience after 40 years of practice. It's accessible right here in this moment. It's up to you to decide to open to it. When you open to it, it's here. So right there with impermanence is, I would not want to call it permanence but Ground. On the relative level, everything is impermanent and yet the Ground is always there. On the relative level, there is emptiness of a separate self. Yet on the ultimate level there is That Which Is, that unborn, undying, and it's not separate from you. As I connect with that, I come to know my ultimate safety. Not me as Barbara, Barbara's going to get old and die. The ultimate safety of being, of experiencing, and the ultimate possibility of freedom. I can't say on the relative level that comfort and sense function doesn't matter, I'm still attached to independence and seeing, I enjoy those things, but I have a very deep trust that if the point comes where I literally am blind, somehow it will work out. We'll still find a way to communicate. I don't have to see you to sit here and give a dharma talk. If you want to communicate with me, you'll find a way to communicate with me. I'll learn Braille. Something will work. It's not a problem. It's only a problem in the fear-based mind that says, "How are we going to fix this?" because it doesn't want to know discomfort, uncertainty, and even emptiness. So it creates stories. It took me decades to become grateful to my deafness as a teacher. I am happy to say that in less than a year I really have a sense of gratitude toward this vision issue. It's been a powerful teacher. I'm sure it will continue to be. I'll continue to share with you what I'm experiencing with it. For now I would have to say that there is discomfort with the experience of not seeing, just as there would be discomfort with a physical pain, but there's no longer suffering. There's not fear. And it's been very powerful to see that the dhamma really works, that there really is freedom. I didn't have to go through this suffering again for 2 decades. The practice works! I do think we can learn in many ways, and I don't think it's fair to say it's working for me this time because of all the years of experience I've had. Many of you have been practicing for a long time. Trust your practice. It will lead you to freedom. You've got to be willing to touch the root of suffering, to go right into the heart of whatever it is that's the issue, with a lot of courage. I won't say without fear, but with a willingness to be present with fear. Then it opens up. Let's sit quietly for a few minutes and then take questions. (pause) Q: … I talked to you about a loss of voice being a teacher and a healer. You said that I could wish for my voice to be healed as well as my spirit. But in your talk, you seemed to be saying that complete acceptance of the physical difficulty is the way to go. And that's how I feel. I am being led. Barbara: I don't think it's either/or. Being present with the experience as it is, not getting caught up in hope and despair, does not mean resignation. Resignation is a contracted energy that says, "It will never be any better. I'm not going to put any effort into healing." Skillful action invites whatever healing is possible, but it comes from a place of love, not a place of fear. I'm still working with the retinal specialist here and am going back to Brazil. I'll do whatever I can. As long as they say there's any possibility of healing, either of them, I'll work with them to see what kind of healing can happen. But I'm not hanging onto results, so I'm not creating suffering. I'm just doing what is there. We have to reach out and make an effort. Q: Well I went through a major surgery two years ago which made the voice worse and since then, I have not tried any more doctors. Barbara: I can understand that. For 30 years, really, people kept saying to me, try this, try that, different kinds of traditional and alternative healing, and none of it felt right. Then I connected with the healer in Brazil and it felt right. I'm not suggesting that is right for you, I'm saying just bide your time and when something comes along that feels right, don't go into a place of fear that says, "Nothing's going to help," because that's just a story also. And it's just fear. We have to be willing to take the risk if intuitively it feels right to trust and try it. Maybe it will help, maybe it won't help, who knows. Q: I also have tried many, many alternative methods. Nothing has worked. Barbara: …It doesn't matter what we do so much as how we do it. If it's driven by fear and comes from a contracted place that's grasping at results, we're going to suffer. I'm not suggesting you're doing that. I'm speaking universally. Even if it works, we're going to suffer because maybe something will work and your voice will start to clear up, and then there will be the fear, "Will it stay? Can I hold on to it?" We come to that place of spaciousness that knows that whatever happens it will be okay, and yet can still invite healing from a loving place. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won't. At a certain level it ceases to matter whether it happens. On the relative level it still will bring pleasure but not always. If I could hear I'd also have to put up with a lot of noise! It will be how it is, hearing or deaf, silence or noise, vision or none. Are there any other questions? (None) (taping ends) Copyright © 2005 |
