When the student is ready August 20, 2008
Posted by Liz Mead in The journey.Tags: Catholic, journey, personal blocks, religion, spirit
2 comments
I was side-swiped this month by a talk with one of my acquaintances.
I work with this person. She and I have similar interests and insights. We’ve read the same books and have similar approaches to the importance of spirit in our life.
She loves and teaches stories, she is a writer and an editor, a seeker, committed to re
lationship building and a Libran. She also has a Catholic background and recently lost her father whom she cared for deeply.
Like me, she believes that the path of the heart is all encompassing and when all is said and done, it is love that resounds and remains at the end of life. I believe, though that she is farther along the path than me and a little clearer on what that tenet actually means in day-to-day life. She is courteous and gentle; a great listener and very thoughtful in her care of others.
When she told me yesterday that she followed a guru in her spiritual practice I had a puzzling and negative reaction. And that worries me.
Despite the fact that we shared so many other interests I didn’t want to hear that she had handed over personal power to another. I find the choice of a guru akin to deifying another and this has never sat well. As I’ve done in the past, I dismissed the path as a possible method to find meaning and enlightenment.
What worries me is that I have no realistic alternative and no real reason for rejecting the path she’s chosen other than fear and confusion. Don’t get me wrong, I want to reach enlightenment along with the next person. Her path however, is dependent on trust and love – and that scares me.
When I went to India 10 years ago I sought the spiritual home I thought I needed. I was on a quest to find meaning and resonance. I had dreamt of gurus, met practitioners, read books, prayed and received confirming indicators that indeed this place and its spiritual practices would provide a place of rich sustaining support. Alas it provided noise, dirt, stress and crowds. I couldn’t see past the smells and confusion. As for inner sight I was lucky to maintain my sanity keeping an eye out for fast moving traffic and bullocks in the middle of the road. I was deeply disappointed and decided I had no spiritual bone in my body.
Besides, I had my darling husband as an alternative ‘religion’. He was my path to the heart. He was my divine other. It was enough. It was real and trustworthy. But it ended. Now without him I am rudderless and back to square one. Still sightless and a little the worse for wear; love might be the thing that matters in life, but it gets stripped away in the surety of death.
The sustaining truth from all of this, though, is that change is the other great constant in life; change in death; change in jobs; change in friends. And that the harbingers of change in my life invariably arrive with a baton – passing on a new curriculum of learning just before its time to move. This new friend brings with her the next list of subjects I am to study. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. In this case with she comes with a lesson plan: advising me to attend to the moment, to stay awake and to remember that for a seeker, the path doesn’t end.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time, T S Eliot
Changing habits March 13, 2008
Posted by Liz Mead in The journey.Tags: journeys, kathmandu, personal blocks, travel
2 comments
Right at this very moment two of my girlfriends are changing.
One is head over heels in love and planning to get married in her garden. And the other has just resigned, rented out her home, and has booked a flight to Kathmandu to work on a community project.
It’s not the first time either of them has done such a thing.
What is it about our lives? We repeat things until we get it right, or hope to get it right, or get it almost right. In any event, who says what’s right except our own in-built moral compass. What interests me is that we keep repeating things.
Just this morning I was talking with friends about this process. How do we stay true to our path? How do we change the direction of that path if it reaches a dead end? And will we know the dead end when it appears? And what about those forks that lead you in circles back on the same path. The forks I call habit.
I’m aware that when we change one part of a puzzle other parts of the puzzle adjust, sometimes with resistance and other times to strengthen the new configuration.
Right now I am changing the way I live and work. I change the way I live in my house by decorating and moving things around. I change the way I work by linking to new media that enables me to operate from home in a far more global way than ever before. All fine because it’s just about me. Where it gets tricky is when other people come into the equation.
This darling soon-to-be-wed friend has had to change arrangements for the overseas trip we were going to take together. The sudden change raised a question of paying more money or losing money to adjust for that change.
My first reaction to the travel change was a default reaction to rescue the situation, to ensure someone else was made happy. To pick up the extra cost so she could be happy. But it didn’t sit right. Something tweaked in this newly-renovated-self. Something made me put my needs out there.
And here’s where the stress arose. If I told her what I wanted and needed, would this friend be angry? Would my needs outweigh hers? Would I lose her as a friend? Whose fault was it anyway? Why rock the boat!?
No need to worry, of course. Once all the information was laid on the table and because she’s a friend, her reaction was of course perfect acquiescence and love. I needn’t have worried.
But I did. Not that I worried for nothing. Rather I worried just enough for the lesson to be remembered well, and the dead-end behaviour to stop.
So I dare say we will keep doing the same things again and again. We’ll repeat the same lesson many times before we’re through. It’s how we do it, each time it comes up, that make the difference, not getting it right.
