A Bodhisattva Heartbeat

A close friend shared with me her Bodhisattva moment. That's not what she called it, she's not a Buddhist, but I'll refer to it as such for context.

She was in meditation and experienced a profound personal moment when the suffering of others touched her soul. She is now more motivated than ever to help others through her vocations.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary: a Bodhisattva is an enlightened being who, out of compassion, forgoes nirvana in order to save others.

This term, Bodhisattva, is sometimes used as an adjective to describe our compassionate nature.

Our culture has a difficult time encouraging our compassionate nature. Some would say it does the opposite, that it promotes unadulterated self-cherishing! I suppose that is where a personal spiritual paths comes in: church, meditation, temple, mosque, humanitarian vocation, self-improvement, simply being nice, etc.

With so much suffering in the world, being open to realizing our compassionate nature is a profound and special blessing. That nature is what motivates us on this crazy path. Our talents and ambitions are ways to channel that compassionate nature. It may feel distant at times but we have that moment to reference when we feel lost and overwhelmed.

I go back to my Bodhisattva moment often.

Over time, that heartfelt moment, no matter how profound and life-changing, may get buried under life stuff but it's always there and we should create ways to rediscovered it in times of discouragement and disillusionment. We may even be tempted to dismiss it a fluke, irrelevant, silly, naive, or impractical.

Worse, many have no context for what they experienced and may never have told a soul about it thinking they were losing their mind. Well, they WERE losing their mind, their self-cherishing mind!

Mother nature created seasons. Our spiritual path experiences seasons too, seasons of bliss, doubt, disillusionment, inspiration, etc. We can learn to adapt to these seasons like changing our wardrobe to fit the weather. Our Bodhisattva moment may be another blessed tool in our spiritual tool box or it may be the ground on which our path began.

How can we re-inspire our Bodhisattva?

Attempting to recreate that moment with an expectation of bliss is sure come up short. (The first time is always special!) Revisiting the source of the inspiration may help or it may simply pronounce the gulf of separation we feel from that moment. Revisiting our own creations born from that moment of bliss, such as a poem, journal writing, or painting, could feel like another person must have created that!

We tend to grasp as results, we want conventional validation and success, whether that is with our efforts to help people or with our own progress on the spiritual path. We think we must be doing something wrong if we can't generate the bliss in meditation or that we didn't handle that crisis as best as we thought we should. The disappointment and discouragement begins to feed on itself.

Is this where faith come in?

I don't particularly like that word, faith. Perseverance has more of a warrior ring to it. Yeah, perseverance!

If helping people was easy and profitable, we would surely be in the Pure Land!

In our darkest moments, sometimes, we can start with simple appreciation of our Bodhisattva nature because having recognized that compassionate nature is a profound result in itself. We know that hiding in self-cherishing will only perpetuate suffering, so we continue on, we must persevere.

Ok, sometimes it feels like I'm limping on!

Namaste!

Post Bliss Blues

When the buzz wore off about nine months (hmmm) after my Kundalini awakening and I found my old self had returned, I was angry. I struggled to remember the insights, to bring them back in all their blissful glory. I watched as the dull thick fog of this illusory experience we call 'reality' smothered the truth beauty I had been gifted to witness. I know it's still there. I know I'm just in the way again. I started to feel like a failure, like I had lost the most precious thing entrusted to me. How could that happen?!

It didn't.

I trust that my path, however it meanders, is just fine. I needed to be hit over the head then return to myself in order to appreciate my path on a deeper level. There is no destination. Watching myself traverse daily experiences of this illusory human experience from multiple vantage points is MY expansion AT THIS TIME. Don't show me your map and tell me I'm lost. I have a different map. I don't know where it is at the moment, but I know it's somewhere and it will knock me upside the head again just when I need it!

:-D

A slow progression of some of the same insights is now beginning to arise within my 'normal' experiences providing a multidimensional understanding of events. Now I understand the writings that say there isn't just one truth, there are many. It's kind of like those movies that take you through a story from different points of view of different characters. Or, to use the age old mountain metaphor...What does the vista look like if you can see it from the bottom of the mountain, the plateau AND the summit all at the same time? Now add the vista from the other side of the mountain!

Perhaps more expansions, more levels of insight are to come that will add to the depth of my experience. Or, perhaps not. I think I have quite enough to work with at the moment, thank you very much!

One truth is that it is late and my body needs rest. Peaceful dreams!

My Kundalini Awakening

So I had this awakening of some sort about a year and a half ago and I was blissed out for nearly a year. I was seeing magic in everything :rolling eyes:. No worries, I finally feel like my old cynical self again. :sigh:

Have you ever read "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry" by Jack Kornfield? If you are on a spiritual path of any kind, it's a must read. In no way am I saying I'm enlightened by any means, but awakening to the interconnectedness of everything is quite the slap upside the head...with a sledgehammer. The stars and birds blink and tweet above your head for a while and then the brain swelling begins to cause nausea and headaches. I can see how living in a cave and hardly ever seeing many people would be much more conducive to maintaining a blissed out state. However, living in NYC and having a stressful day job will kill a dharma buzz in a new york minute.

I'm blessed with an uncomplicated life (ahem, single no kids) so taking a week off to pace my apartment in a manic state was called paid sick time. If I hadn't had a meditation practice, I would have checked myself into a psych hospital for a mental breakdown or mid-life crisis or gone to the ER for a brain scan. I knew this was either the Buddhas kicking my spiritual ass or a brain tumor.

After five days of not sleeping or eating, just frantically writing crazy memories and pacing like a lunatic, it climaxed in a near hallucinatory vision of a golden tapestry. I could see how every single thing was interconnected and meaningful, even down to a grain of sand. I think I was crying and laughing at the same time. A profound blanket of peace settled on me and I felt as though I could sit there for ever accept that I couldn't wait to write it down (can you say grasping?). I was so excited by it. I was pouring out love to every one on the street and on the subway. Don't panic, I wasn't actually interacting with anyone like a real crazy person, but I was sending out the love vibes because I simply didn't know what else to do.

I was clearly out of my league, so I reached out for some guidance. My meditation teacher simply listened and smiled. Research on the Internet and several more books later, I figured it was some kind of Kundalini awakening. I still don't know what that is! There are so many different descriptions, so many different views on what to do and what not to do (do energy work, don't do energy work). None of my Dharma books say anything about it. Bits and pieces of this new age book, that new age blog, and different online forums of normal people chatting about their experiences have been more help than anything else. Books by so-called experts usually take an "I know everything, do it this way or else" approach and that doesn't sit right with me, and men write most of them, of course. "Oneness" by Rasha (a woman) was the only book I found to be quite helpful, though, a bit 'out there.' (Yes, gender makes a difference in how deep emotional experiences are written and since I'm a woman...)

So, after all that, this is where I am with it: I suppose I'm supposed to just make of it whatever and however is helpful to me on my path. I think.

:-/

It's just a crazy memory now. I almost hope it doesn't happen again.

Gotta start somewhere

I'm a reluctant spiritual traveler but aren't we all? Many people just don't realize it yet but they are on a path too. Ignorance is bliss until you learn that ignorance is the root of all our problems. So real bliss is wisdom realizing emptiness but it may take you countless lifetimes to get there. In the meantime, we are supposed to JOYFULLY embark on an endless journey to enlightenment through various realms of suffering.

Okayyyy, who the hell thought of this stuff? Why create samsara and ignorance in the first place?! And what's so great about enlightenment if there's nothing there?! Nihilism is more optimistic that this! I think we are being played. Or is this supposed to be play?