Doctortayria's Blog

A friend asked me tonight, “What gives you joy right now?” I like this question. It might be a good one to stop and ask oneself and each other often, maybe daily.

Sitting with this question and a blank mind, the word that comes to me is “sensations.” Such as when I think of my daughter Josi I get certain sensations. I can feel them even running through my arms right now, tiny cellular wiggles of pleasure that come uniquely with thoughts of her. Even just brushing past Arlene in my mind (my other daughter) makes me grin, with a yellow warmth in my belly and something like the taste of triple-cream brie cheese in my mouth. It might last only a second, and might even precede the thought of Arlene, but I always know it is Arleneness. Seeing the pinkish purplish sky through the skeletons of naked trees outlining the mountains each evening at dusk brings a different sensation.

Right now, this moment, my answer to the question is sensations – the particularity of them, the signatures of the multitudes of different kinds, noticing and distinguishing these is consistent joy. It feels like I am the violin that is being played. The music moves through my instrument. Even dark moods have intriguing signatures. Missing my dog is an aching sweetness.

Sensations, my answer for this moment. What about you?

The mushrooming crisis in Egypt is hypnotizing the world right now. I never felt that connected to Egypt before, it was a land of far away and of mystery. I’ve even traveled to several countries in Northern Africa, but never to Egypt. So how can this eruption feel as if my own belly is exploding I wonder?

From the standpoint of the people it seems so obvious. Go away! We don’t want you anymore. We are the majority, you are not, why should you rule over us?

Yet this is like looking in a mirror. The autocratic dictators in individual psyches and organisms of people run unconsciously seemingly forever, like Mumbarak’s government. When a wake up occurs, is it easily overthrown? Twelve-step programs and therapy models proliferate on every subject. The change of psychic as well as social order is profoundly difficult and often deadly.

What can I do for Egypt? “Be the change you want to see in the world,”  says Gandhi. Work with my own inner dictators, create a fierce but peaceful revolution, work on the same with my friends, clients, loved ones, and wherever I can, hoping that the ripples in the water of psychological life will go out and intersect with the circles of the world.

I am tempted to feel powerless as I watch this suffering and blood bath. But I do believe the individual is powerful beyond imagining. As Laurens Van der Post said in his book The Dark Eye in Africa:

“It is, for me, no idle coincidence that the most significant discovery in the physical world of this age has been the fact that the greatest and most unimaginable power resides in the smallest possible organization of matter. The force which threatens to blow the world asunder resides not in the clouds or mountains but in the invisible heart of the atom. The inner force, too, which, like the power of the atom, can either remake or shatter civilization resides in the smallest unit of society, the individual. The individual is the secret advance base from which this power sets out to invade committee rooms, mothers meetings, county councils, parliaments, continents and nations.”

We don’t have to sit hypnotized and watch. We begin in ourselves and work vigorously from there.

I just finished watching the Screen Actors Guild Awards and I think I maybe smile like an idiot through whole shows like this. These are our storytellers. They do such an extraordinary service for us. They take on all of the public scrutiny and people going through their histories and telling of their worst life moments as if it were entertainment – just so they can continue to do their craft and tell OUR stories. I love them for this and I love to see them acknowledge one another and be honored.

Laurence Olivier, who I met as his son Richard was a friend of mine, (who also told me that I had such beautiful eyes that all of the boys must have had a hard time with it – can you imagine hearing that from Laurence Olivier?) was quoted tonight. I love his quote. “What is better than the work of an actor? – to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself.”

I honor the film industry for teaching my heart, over and over, the knowledge of itself. I am forever amazed at the level of beauty and dignity and integrity and prophecy and wisdom and humor and gracefulness and love of the people who give us movies. In old days people used to sit around a fire and tell stories every night to keep the community alive, happy and inspired. Now we have movies. Thank heaven.

Yesterday’s writing on Absence and Presence brought out deeply poetic responses from a few readers, which move me to say a bit more about what I was experiencing, and include Rainer Maria Rilke’s voice on my musings. I knew in the state I was in that picking up his Book of Hours would bring comfort and insight to me.

Longing is what I was feeling; a longing so profound it is voiceless, it dare not speak or rise toward the surface. Longing to be held in a quiet cave, like atomic power. Does the sun long for the earth? Yet should it merge with earth it would destroy it. Does the earth long for the sun? Yet she keeps a careful orbit and spins and dances the seasons to display her longing without racing toward him.

My longing causes me to want to jump, like the moth, into the flame and dissolve. It is a power to be respected, and managed, to be felt but not fully released, to be contained without dangerous oppression or compression. Sitting with it is sometimes all I can do. This sitting can be the most exhausting labor of all my life.

I found this stanza in one of Rilke’s poems:

You, my own deep soul,
trust me. I will not betray you.
My blood is alive with many voices
telling me I am made of longing.

And this poem:

You, God, who live next door —

If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking —
this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.
I know you’re all alone in that room.
If you should be thirsty, there’s no one
to get you a glass of water.
I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!
I’m right here.

As it happens, the wall between us
is very thin. Why wouldn’t a cry
from one of us
break it down? It would crumble
easily,

it would barely make a sound.

Even in absence there can be presence
But when the presence goes out of absence
And there is only absence
Absence is intensified.

This intense absence is its own kind of presence
And absence.
Intense absence
The presence of only absence within absence
Is what I feel now.
A numbing void.

After death comes resurrection. Remember that.

I have always remembered reading or hearing that when Einstein was asked what he was most curious about, he answered “I want to know God’s thoughts.”

I think about this regularly. I so agree.

God, what are you thinking?

What are you thinking?

What are you thinking!!??

The anniversary of the epic tragedy in Haiti has just passed, and Channel 4 news last night showed an update on one of the stories from that time that has stayed with me since then. A woman trapped underground would not be given up upon by her husband, he just knew she was in there alive. Day after day, he stood by and would not believe she had died under there. News cameras showed his expression as he gazed over the massive rubble, the intentness, focus and heart that he expressed, the purpose. That man would not be moved from there, his wife was in there and he knew it. Because of his sureness, big equipment continued to move massive rubble and search. Six days later, the husband heard his wife’s voice from deep below, they called to each other. When the rescue workers finally pulled her out of the ground on a stretcher, after six days of darkness, starvation and thirst, she came out singing, bellowing a powerful song.

A friend and I were talking about the Greek myth of Demeter tonight. The aspect of her story that always struck me deeply was the fact that after her daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades into the underworld, Demeter never, ever gave up on finding her daughter. She wandered the earth night and day. Because she was the goddess of the seasons, she caused them to stop and the earth to lay fallow. Zeus finally noticed and got Hades to release Persephone to her mother.

When this myth came up tonight I thought of that man in Haiti, his Demeter-like persistence, and damned if he didn’t force the gods to release his wife. He got her back.

I built an altar last night to my Twin Self, as a shaman I worked with years ago told me that his Nigerian people do. The Twin Self is that part of us that lives outside of this sphere of temporal reality, connected to us while not suffering the trials and tribulations of duality. It watches with us. I will keep this altar alive during a 40-day ritual I just started. I think now of that Twin Self as Demeter. She is holding a vigil for the Persephone part of me that has been abducted to Hades. She’s going to bring her back.

Today is the first Full Moon of 2011. I chose this as a beginning date for a 40-day ritual I have been dreaming up to call in assistances I need with areas of my life and character where I feel weakest, and to offer myself more actively in the work that I have prepared my whole life to do. A dream I woke up with this morning gave me the title, Dancing with Will.

Twice in the last year, friends I have worked with have mentioned to me the need for will power in accomplishing some of the goals I am reaching for. Will power. I took their advice to heart. I have been turning the phrase over and over in the last months, considering. I tried to muster up more of it. A rebel inside roars back threateningly, destructively even. The struggle seems fierce so I back off and muse some more. Try again. Back off again.

I finally came to terms with some of the history of this struggle. During much of my life I used my will to lead a disciplined life that seems almost impossible to me from where I sit now. For the better part of 20 years I meditated 4 times a day; early morning, noon, dusk and before sleep. I fasted every Saturday, and on numerous other days. I was a minister, writing talks that I gave regularly, attending meetings and services several times a week. I had a full time job. I never drank alcohol or used any other such substances. All this time I was raising two gorgeous children. I was married and gave time and attention to that relationship. It took extraordinary will power to do all of these things. I had a will of steel and I used it.

At the end of those years came the breakdown I was heading for, as I see it from this distance. The force of my own will that had gotten me to such a place began to feel like Hitler, a tyrant over the parts of myself that had just wanted to be, to live, to stop and play, to love and live extravagantly with the senses, to say yes! and no thank you! very differently, to listen to my trampled inner guidance system.

I remember hearing that in the Kogi tribe in South America, the chosen shamans are raised for the first nine years of their lives in a dark cave, never to come out, see the light, or wander about. They are tuning in to something else, something the daylight world would distract them from. A breakdown can send one into a psychological state that resembles that experience – a cave-like, dark underworld, light-years away from the daylight world even as you are moving about in it. Such an event can be the biggest and best blessing a seeker will ever have, though it is impossible to know that until later. During years of being out of synch with the “upper world,” one learns priceless things about self, psyche, god and nature that won’t be discovered in any other way.

I have been coming through the breakdown years in stages. This year, 2011, though, I believe it is time for me to re-enter the upper world more actively and aggressively, though I’m not sure what that will look like. It will definitely mean recovering a relationship with will power. My efforts have not been going well. Will power and I seem to be like oil and water, or electrical currents that go “psssssssssttttttttt” when they touch. So I have been thinking we have to find a way to move with each other in a dance – not forcing, no pressing or repelling, just move around one another, noticing each other, dancing.

I decided to do some dancing every day during this 40-day period with some of the things that I need more will power to achieve. Do one career activating thing each day, change one lazy physical habit each day, small applications of energy and intention that hopefully won’t make the rebel forces too upset.

This morning I woke up with a dream that blew me away. In it, I was packing to leave a big house. A very old friend was around that I was really pissed, really pissed at. I was planning not to tell him I was leaving or say good-bye. I knew this was out of character for me, to be rude like that and to be that upset, but I was pissed! He saw me shutting my suitcase and came over to say something. I actively ignored him and walked away. He came up behind me and put his hands on my waist. I stiffened. Finally I turned to look him in the face so that he could see how angry I was. He put his hands on my waist again and started ever so gently moving my hips as he moved his, swaying, a subltle dance. I kept my own arms at my side stiffly, but started to move a little bit with him. Finally I put my hands on his waist and tried to dance more willingly, knowing that if I put my arms around his neck it would be more intimate but that wasn’t ready to happen. I woke up.

Will. That guy was Will! It didn’t even hit me until about an hour or so after I woke up that this was the exact image for the ritual I had been planning, starting today, and I woke up with that precise dream. Dancing with Will.

I love dreams so much! And ritual. Here we go.