My Beach

Today at work there was a pot luck lunch. everyone gathered at once and ate a feast, about 25 people in all. I was looking forward to it, heck I had even suggested it. We also had a DVD of our corporate business meeting which was held in Baltimore a few weeks ago. As I sat in this atmosphere I was getting triggered left and right, I was definitely not having fun, and I was finding almost everyone annoying. I could not get present in this atmosphere, I felt like the life was being sucked out of me. I witnessed all of this and at one point thought to myself, 'oh great, here I go back into story land' My mind told me I was regressing back to the time when I did not have direct experience of feeling what is here without condition. I continued to witness that, and decided it was time to go home, to get out of there. As I drove east, as far east as the road would take me, I was still sitting with all of it, and I said out loud, ' I don't believe any of it!' Any of the stories my mind was spinning about what went on today. As soon as I got home, I changed clothes and went for a long long walk on the beach. No other person was there, just me, the gulls, sandpipers, kingfishers and pelicans. I walked, being with the ocean, until I returned to spaciousness and my own being-ness. what I have sometimes described as Nanci-ness.

I am now sitting looking at the silent sound, (yes, I know!) and I can again hold it all. At the end of the day I was exhausted, and I realized that when I used to get spun up and attached to every single thing, and then set out to 'fix it' or 'do something about it' that I would be exhausted at the end of those days too. I am grateful that I can return to being-ness by being with what is without condition. ahhhh. here is a picture of my beach.

















And the sunset

Being With Everyone as They are Now

Last Tuesday I found myself driving from Raleigh to the beach by myself, I stayed at home to take care of a few things while Dan went back to the beach and work on Monday. On the way I popped in a Michael Brown CD. I have listened to this particular CD about 10 times. It is funny how each time I do, I hear something different, this time I heard that everyone/thing stays here, they just change form. (badly paraphrased I am sure) As I sat with that thought after I got back to the beach, I made the intention to welcome Leah as is now in my every day life. This has been my intention each day as I arose, and often during the day she would be here, and I would just be with her as she is, and be grateful. Today as I was chopping green pepper I remembered how my mom would slice off the top circle of the pepper and give it to me to eat, and then later give it to Leah to eat. (my inner little girl always wondered why I didn't get the pepper any more, but that is another story!) As I was thinking about that, I felt Leah say to me, "you know your mom and dad are also here, are you willing to welcome them as they are now?" My thinking brain immediately said, NO! and I just witnessed it saying no, and returned to the feeling of my parents being here. Then the tears came, and I stared at the water in the sound and let them come, being with the feeling of welcoming my parents as they are now. As I did, something shifted, and I felt a part of my relationship with them heal. And then we all danced!

I have not yet talked about when I discovered Michael Brown's work in the course of my Samyama journey. Here is the link to his website if you are ready to go there now.

http://www.thepresenceportal.com/

Samyama as a Way of Life

Even though Leah's death was my portal into living daily in my heart, Samyama affected every other aspect of my life. Through Samyama I was able to access parts of my self, my inner child self that I never could before. The key here was allowing her to feel what she was feeling in the moment. I had done inner child work many years before, but never with the feeling part. By allowing my little girl to feel what she was feeling, no matter what age she appeared in a given moment, I was able to meet parts of myself that I had never met before. I knew they existed, but only under the the guise of fear, or anger, or some other was of acting out or trying to control outcomes. Samyama was the key that unlocked access to myself, for the first time I was coming face to face with mySelf. When I was able to relate to myself, and listen to myself and allow myself to feel all of my relationships with others began to change, not because I was changing them, but rather my attitude was changing, I was integrating parts of myself that had been in shadow. When I began meeting these shadow parts of myself in my heart they were great teachers. All parts of ourselves want to be met. Samyama gave me the technology to meet them as they are in my heart. This is a huge gift.


The biggest relationship changes occured with my husband Dan, and my son Peter. Pete was 20 when he lost his sister. I cannot imagine what it was like to lose your only sibling, at that tender age.

The three of us all dealt with our grief in our own way, and we were always open to each other. The wisdom in that was each of us knew we had to attend to ourselves first. It was several years before Dan and I could comfort each other. In the first few years we did most of our grief processing in private. Once we emerged from the day-to-day shock of losing Leah, we then came smack up against places in ourselves and our marriage that were not serving us. We began a multi-year process of just sitting with our shit day by day, burning and burning. We even held a ritual we called our spiritual divorce to meet and surrender all that was no longer serving us in our relationship. The next part of this journey was an intent to enter into a Sacred Partnership. This was followed by a couple more years of sitting and burning. None of this was comfortable and a lot of it was downright painful. We were no longer willing to make due, we spoke our intent to meet each other from our own Truth and integrity, each bringing a whole person to the other, not looking to the other to make us complete. Two years later, we committed to each other at sunrise on a beach in Cozumel. We did not plan it, it organically arose during the time we were in Cozumel. Today, we continue our journey first taking care of our own work, and meeting each other consciously in each moment as it arises rather than bringing up stories from our past, or fabricating new ones. Or maybe what really happens is when we do find ourselves in the stories we now know where to find ourselves, and how to meet the stories and get beneath them. These days we do not begin any important conversation without first sitting in silence with our intentions for outcome in our hearts. The outcome is always without attachment of how we are going to get there. It is amazing to me where these explorations take us after we sit.

Self Samyama

That first experience with Samyama encouraged me to deepen my practice. At that point I was doing inner process work twice a month with a facilitator, mostly Samyama, mostly in my sessions. I had proven to myself one of the really cool things about Samyama, I could do it by my SELF! Doing self-Samyama takes a lot of discipline, or at least that was the story I was telling myself at the time. I did it, but not longer than 3 or 5 minutes, and still it was phenomenal how it worked. My self-samyama sessions made the Samyama work I did with my Samyama practitioner deeper. I look at the time between these early Samyama experiences and Leah's death as dabbling in Samyama.

I had a moment of clarity soon after she died that I had been preparing for what was to come next for a long time. It was one of those moments that crystallized for me that everything that I did up until that moment happened exactly right at exactly the right time. It was also the first time I thought that my own experience is valid for me, but at that time it was still a head thought, it would be years before I knew this to be true in my heart. After Leah died, I knew intuitively that Samyama was the only thing that would take me from moment to moment in my pain and despair and grief. I dove into it, still wanting things to be different, and at the same time knowing that the only way through this was to be with the pain, devastation and grief as it appeared in each moment. Easy, no, necessary, yes. This was not a conscious, well thought out analytical decision, it was a heart decision, it was almost choice-less.

For several years, my Samyama practitioner extended the invitation to attend the Temple of the Sacred Feminine. (then called The School for Women Healers)
http://www.templeofthesacredfeminine.com/Temple/Home/index.html
The information I saw always intrigued me, but I thought I was not evolved enough. Now that was a big story! After Leah died, I was drawn to attend one of the portal weekends. I still did not feel evolved enough, but I could not stay away. Other grief support groups I looked in to did not resonate with me. This was not grief support, rather it was a community of women who welcomed me and supported me and loved me from the moment I stepped foot inside the Sophia Center. It was unlike any other community experience I had ever had. They did not try to fix me. They held me when I wailed. The were sacred witnesses to my broken open heart. I was able to just BE, for the first time in my life. I attended the Temple for 4 years, and entered apprenticeship for Samyama practitioners. I spent another 4 years completing my apprenticeship. As my journey in the Temple and my apprenticeship spiraled, my Samyama practice became my way of meeting each day. Living from my heart radically changed my life.

From where I am now I can see that the inner work I had done to that point prepared me to do the work I entered, willing to be with whatever arose in the moment, without wanting it to be different. I did not need to talk endlessly about what happened only to stay in the drama. Sometimes I think that would have been easier, to stop everything right where I was and be the victim , the poor woman who lost her daughter, I know I was tempted more than once to stay there. And each time I took the feelings to my heart and allowed them to be as they were, I gradually learned that I could feel the pain with out suffering. At times, I would receive an unexpected blessing. At first I felt guilty for feeling anything other than pain, for receiving a new insight, or a connection that would not have been possible under any other circumstances. The beauty of Samyama is we start with whatever is there, when I felt guilt, I would go in to the guilt in my heart and feel it, listen to any stories my head was telling me, witness the stories, and return to my heart, to the feeling, always returning to the feeling. The feeling by itself, with out the story of the feeling was/is always different. You and I may each have different stories of anxiety, we may each describe it differently, and it may hold different feelings. When we bring awareness to the feeling of anxiety to our heart, while dropping our stories of anxiety, that is where the alchemy happens. A shift may occur the first, third or hundredth time you bring this feeling to your heart. I was going to say 'each time you bring this same feeling to your heart' however, if you are bringing something to your heart in the moment in which it arises, it is never exactly the same. It is only when we think it is the same, when we tell ourselves the same story about it that we always have, that is seems like the 'same old thing' coming up again and again. When we are present in each moment, it is like we are starting at the beginning. It is the scrupulous devotion to being with what is, exactly as it arises in the present moment that has brought me from the moment my daughter died to this moment. Along the way, in each moment many wondrous things happened. I suspect some of them will be placed upon this altar, when the time is right.

Gratitude

I am filled tonight with so much gratitude. I am grateful for the silent sound and the raucous ocean. I am grateful for warm hugs, in person, or sent on email.

Just sit for a moment and feel the gratitude in your heart.....now feel it, really feel it with out the object of your gratitude. Feel the energy of gratitude......just feel it in your heart.

Me with Dan and Pete
Leah

My Introduction To Samyama

When I think back to the first time I really really 'got' Samyama, it was an exchange with Leah. I had been introduced to Samyama and I had been practicing it before this 'first' time for about a year. Learning the discipline of going to my heart took a long time for me, certainly a lot longer than some of my clients are able to do. My first experience of how holding something in my heart can cause a shift occurred with anger. It was anger about an exchange I had with Leah, then a young teenager. This was an intense raging anger that I had known before. Nothing I had ever done could get rid of the anger. My thought in that moment, was something like "well nothing else has ever worked, I might as well Samyama it" So I allowed myself to feel the rage as intense as it was in that moment. My fear was that I was going to completely explode if I allowed myself to go into it completely. That is what had happened when I tried to get rid of it, or ignore it, or deny it. I would explode in a rage so frightening that I vowed to never get angry again. Well that didn't work. As I sat and felt my anger it did get bigger and bigger, and I just sat with it and felt it. And then it started to shift. I stayed with it a little more, and it shifted a little more. And then it was gone, and I felt gratitude. WHAT?? In that moment I did not question what had happened, I stayed with the feeling of gratitude and knew that I had for the first time experienced the alchemy that happens when awareness is brought to the heart.

Feeling Joy and Pain

What came up for me today is I can feel joy even though Leah is no longer here in form. I don't even try to explain this phenomenon, there are no words. It has been over 8 years since Leah has died. I have cried rivers of tears, asked WHY a million times, written thousands of words, and gotten stuck in the mire of the accident and the time in the hospital. It is only when I return to my heart and feel those feelings in this moment that I get it. Samyama has served me well in this respect. I now know I can hold it all in my heart. When I let the pain be as it is and hold it in my heart, a shift happens. The more I try to explain this, to put words to the process, the more the words elude me. All I know is that it is beyond feeling at this point. It is just about Being. Being without condition with all of it. Feeling the energy beneath the story, what ever the story is. I can hear Leah telling me to lighten up. I am willing to surrender the story of how a mother who lost her daughter is 'supposed to behave' So that is what I put on the altar today.

Opening to What Is

Samyama offers a way of meeting each moment of life. Whether it is an ordinary moment in our day-to-day lives (like sitting in traffic when you are late for an appointment), or one of unusual trauma, grief, joy, or pleasure. The practice of Samyama helps us to open to what is, as it is. Allowing us to experience the perfection of Life as it is, no matter how it appears. This is so even in the most heart-shattering experiences. Samyama alleviates the suffering of wanting things to be different than they are–no matter what they are.
Samyama can assist us to dissolve painful psychological states and the layers of protection over our hearts. Forgiveness, love, compassion, and joy arise naturally. We can give up struggling and agonizing. This is not a method to fix what is wrong. Samyama consistently reveals so beautifully that there is nothing wrong, and no one needing to be fixed. It leads us to realize that every wound is a portal to the Holy, if we can be present enough to recognize it. Samyama teaches us presence.
Samyama is a simple heart centered practice that is a way of being with whatever arises in each moment.

Welcome

As I completed my apprenticeship and stepped over the threshold of my practice, I was moved to begin this blog. The name of the blog arose from the name of my daily journal. As I enter my practice, I am willing to not know what it will look like and I welcome all that arises in the moment.