Jerrash

Today I went to Jerrash. It is a site with extensive Roman ruins. As it turns out, it was the day for all the teenage girls to have a field trip there. Literally there were hundreds of them, all laughing and crying out, just being teens. (I think teens are the same all over the world). They were very friendly, vivacious, and fun. They loved to ask me where I was from, what was my name, was I married, etc. One girl asked me why everyone in the west thinks that Arabs are terrorists...I told her I thought it was because of the media. Then I asked her what she thought of the hijab, because I noticed some girls were wearing it and others were not. She said that she would wear it when she got older, because otherwise God would send her to Hell. Wow! I did not expect that answer. I wish I could have asked some other girls the same question and heard some of their answers. Basically, most of them thought I was the coolest thing around, being from America and all. With their basic English skills and outgoing personalities, they would say things like, "You are so beautiful! We love you! Do you love to the Jordan people? Can we see your eyes?" (I was wearing sunglasses.) After I took the glasses off, they all cheered. "Ohh, you have such beautiful eyes!" they said. Some of them had drums that they would play, and the whole group would sing an Arabic song. Of course, they wanted ME to sing, and dance. I finally agreed to sing a Justin Bieber song with them, the same one that was so popular with my teenage students in Nepal ("Baby, baby"). After finishing the chorus, a security guard and the girls' teacher asked us to stop. Adults here don't like women and girls getting too excited or singing/dancing too much in public. What a shame. All I could think was that these girls are SO lovely and energetic, with such free spirits. They were so curious about me too. I felt sad that they were growing up in a society where they will be so held back in their creative expression and freedom.

Amman Continued

Amman is WAY different than anywhere in India. No cows in the streets, no open sewers. Everything is clean and empty and calm compared to India. Also, all the buildings are the color of sand. Much less colorful. Most women wear hijab (head covering), but it is not required, especially of non-Muslim Western women. Most of the signs are in Arabic, but the tourist ones are in English, and most people do speak English. I have had no trouble getting around. Yesterday I went around the downtown tourist sites by myself. I went to see the Citadel, which is the site of some Roman ruins (a Hercules temple) on the top of a high hill. It was a gorgeous view of the whole city. It is a beautiful thing to hear all the mosques chanting the call to prayer. The only other loud sound is the song of the ice cream trucks, which also deliver gas for cooking stoves to each house. They play a song in a minor key that sounds eerie and mysterious. Much less honking of horns than India, although I think it is probably still more than Eugene. I love the Arabic language. It is so beautiful. I also love Arabic music....I bought 6 cds for a dollar each. The food is great - falafels, pita bread, hummus, baba ganoush. I got a taste of the "Arab hospitality" that the people are known for in the Middle East. As I was walking down the hill from the Citadel, I heard some women laughing from inside a house. I peeked my head in, and the smiled and shouted, "Hello! How are you? Come in! Would you like some coffee?" I went inside and they served me a tiny cup of strong Arab coffee, along with some bread which I ate with cheese. It was great. They were a very happy family, the husband and wife were retired, and their daughter had several small, cute children who danced to Arabic music that was playing on the Arab MTV channel. After leaving, I met another tourist from England who I spent the afternoon with. In the evening, I went with Samia and some of her friends to a place outside Amman where there was a beautiful view of another town, all lit up at night. We smoked shisha (flavored tobacco from one of those big Arabian tobacco-smoking gigs) and talked while enjoying the view. Today Samia and I plan to visit Jerash, a site to the north with amazing Roman ruins. If there is time, we will also visit Um Qais, which is supposed to be very beautiful. Tomorrow Samia is going to Egypt, and I will go South with her, either to Petra or to Wadi Rum (a beautiful desert). I plan on crossing into Israel on May 3.

Amman, Jordan

I'm now staying comfortably at my friend's apartment in Amman, Jordan. We went to visit the Dead Sea today, right after my flight landed around noon. Wow, I was floating so high in the water! It was weird, but cool. The Dead Sea is the lowest place on Earth, and also has such a high salt content that nothing can live in it and your body naturally floats really high in its waters. There are rocks encrusted in salt crystals on the shore, and when you swim in the water, it looks and feels almost like oil because it is so salty. I could see Israel on the other side. The rest of the landscape was very dry and deserty. It was amazing, flying through Sharjah in UAE and also flying into Amman - the plane almost looked like it was just going to land in the desert, before it landed on the airstrip. When I flew out of Sharjah I saw the city rising up out of the desert at the edge of the water, the skyscrapers blending in with the color of the sand like it was another planet. Amazing.

Musings on Life and Growth

In admiring and perceiving the acts of other beings, I remember that I am I and they are they, as different as two grasshoppers munching away in a field. After a while I think that what I do is just as good as what they do, and vice versa.

I notice how, after many months of traveling, I do not appreciate the contrasts so much anymore. I don’t see the beauty or appreciate the novelty of clashing cultures as much as I did when I was fresh off the airplane.

I am so ready to leave this place. I am ready to be home, to see my family, to be normal again. To express myself fully, openly, for all to see, and not feel judged for it by people from another culture who don’t understand me. Maybe in having this experience, I can relate to other people who have spent a long time away from home, away from their native cultures. I am so fortunate to be able to return home. Some people cannot do that because their homes do not exist anymore, or it is not possible with life situations for them to return. For example, like immigrants or refugees.

There is something so palpable about missing your homeland. It really is the land, and the people, and the songs which wind through both.

The knowledge that I want to be the best person I can possibly be, to assist in the global transformation of Earth into a place of light and truth, requires me doing exactly what my heart wants. My heart really misses my family and wants to go home soon.

I remember how heart-opened and free I felt when I was first in Nepal, teaching English in Nakote village. My heart was carrying me. My love was carrying me. My heart is no longer carrying me in India, because it has already set its course for home. It has set its course on love, and is doing everything it can to draw love experiences to it because that is what it craves.

I deserve to be in love now. I deserve to see, feel, and express beauty, to enjoy myself. I am free to go and do what my heart desires, because God is at the center of my heart.

I wonder, too, if my heart is actually a higher-dimensional being than I am. It doesn’t always resonate with specific plans or actions, but rather with feelings, frequencies, and energetic vibrations. I think I am starting to live from here, from a purely energetic, higher-dimensional place. Maybe just getting tastes.

I love the feeling of self-acceptance and situational acceptance. I love being right here, right now. Inside the envelope of this moment are stories to be told, lives to be had, love to be felt. I am so grateful.

It is so strange to be in a place that feels so utterly foreign to me (India). The people and the society are so opposite to who I am. They are counter-intuitive. Because of this contrast, I can more quickly define myself and my boundaries. It is actually crucial to my sanity to do this; otherwise, if I wasn’t clear about only doing what I want, I would be torn apart by guilt, shame, fear, anger, and hatred in less than five minutes.
It is so easy to make the mistake of comparing myself to others. So easy to fall into the traps of the many misunderstandings I’ve had about the different paths of the many lives on this planet. Mostly, I am saying that it is dangerous to compare myself to other people. Doing this invites the judgments which might assert a whole host of viewpoints, like “I am better than he is,” or “She is better than I am,” or “He needs to stop doing that and be more this way so that I can feel more comfortable.”

Helambu is a beautiful land (where I volunteered last fall). Nepal, the Himalaya, astounding. But looking into my own eyes, I know the landscape of my own heart is also beautiful. Perhaps it is more beautiful than outer landscapes. It is a dreamscape, a soulscape, a lovescape. Planting myself there, in my heart, has been one of the most rewarding and difficult experiences of my life.

I desire to live from my heart with a sense of ease and grace. I am attracted to people who move through life easily and gracefully – I would like to find this in myself and make a habit of it.

Something had to get cleaned out of me by going to India. I had to make room for all the empty space to breathe in! I had to open up and let go before more love, joy, trust, and centered decision-making could happen.

I am realizing that a lot of this trip has been about learning what fear really is. I used to think that fear was just a nuisance; that it was usually an unfounded emotion just getting in the way of my true desires. I would push through fear and feel it out violently, as though it were some disease to be cleansed and purified out of my body.

Now my understanding of fear has shifted. I also see fear as a valuable sign, a tool which helps to guide me and lets me know what I am ready for and what I am not ready for. When the fear response is in balance and I am not working on clearing past fears, this fear response can actually be a guide to truth. The fear doesn’t show me the truth; it just points the direction, like a sign with an arrow. It points to the corner of my universe where beautiful things want to be happening, and if I allow my love and attention to go there, I can be surprised by the ease, breath, and grace I find.

Life, for me, does not have to be so hard. Clear discernment of the heart, connected with the body, and verified by trusted friends who have good intuitive sense, can guide me into clearer pathways of light. A different perception of time is also required here. I mean that grasping at the future is not a healthy way to get anywhere. Force and effort are exhausting. It is better to let my river flow in the direction it naturally wants to go.

It is entirely possible for good, healthy, enjoyable emotions to also be parts of myself which I have been denying. Maybe it has been a practice of mine to deny myself good things like comfort, ease, wealth, beauty, and simple pleasures. This practice is even more apparent in India, where the general environment is harsh, annoying, loud, unrefined, invasive, and obnoxious. My small acts of self-care really stand out in contrast to this environment. Maybe the environment here is a reflection of the way I have treated myself in the past, and in learning to do things in contrast to it, I am learning to distance myself from old patterns of self-criticism, forcing, and over-expending effort.

Perhaps I am creating my own meaning here, but I still think it is a useful metaphor for changing personal behavior patterns. Any new, life-supporting pattern is obviously going to feel totally different than an old, self-destructive pattern. The two energies are polar opposites. Perhaps I am in the middle of my own “Precession of the Equinoxes,” where my core operating system is drastically shifting poles from being life/self - destructive to life/self - supportive. I like this analogy a lot, even if it is mostly intellectual! Maybe I will watch my body and emotions to see if they can verify its truth also.

Ciao for now,
Melissa

A Visit to Mahananda Siddha

Yesterday was New Year’s Eve in Tamil Nadu, the province in India where I have been staying for the past two weeks. I went with my friends Ganga, Tara, Sanjay, Lavania, and Swami to see a great Siddha (Aka “medicine person” in Shamanic language. You could also call him a saint or sage in other traditions). His name is Mahananda Siddha, and here is his story:

About ten years ago, he was a normal man in his seventies living in Bangalore. He had made his fortune by exporting turmeric, and then became the CEO of several software companies. Needless to say, he was a VERY wealthy man, even by American standards. He was also very spiritual, and donated large portions of his fortune to restoring and renovating temples and feeding hungry devotees and sadhus (wandering ascetic pilgrims).

Then, one night, Shiva appeared to him in his bedroom. Shiva told him to give up everything – all his companies, his wealth, his wife and kids, and go meditate on a specific mountain in Tamil Nadu, called Mahadeva Malai (Great Lord Mountain). So he followed Shiva’s request, giving up everything and going to this mountain. When he arrived there, Shiva gave him very specific instructions. He told him to never cut his hair again, to only take a bath once a year, and to only wear one piece of cloth all year and change it when he takes his bath. The catch is that Shiva also told him to never eat food or drink water again, that he should instead lie directly on a fire every morning and absorb his energy that way. These days, Mahananda Siddha calls the food we eat “dummy food.” He says “You get your energy 2nd or 3rd hand, from plants or animals; I get my energy 1st hand directly from the sun, the fire.” There is only one exception to this routine, which is that he doesn’t lie in the fire if it is raining because that stops the rain, and he says the farmers need the rain.

Yesterday was quite a blessing, to say the least. It is common for Hindu devotees to perform the ritual of abhishek, which involves pouring water or milk over a Shiva lingam (a phallic-shaped stone representing Shiva). All over India, Hindu priests have been performing this ceremony for thousands of years. Yesterday, we performed abhishek to Mahananda Siddha, pouring water and milk all over his head. He says this is energetically equivalent to doing abhishek on 30 million Shiva lingams simultaneously.

On our way home, our friend Swami showed us a holy place where a great yogi is entombed. They call these places “Samadhis”, where great yogis have since dropped the body, but their spirit continues to remain in that place and nourish the spiritual life of the people. It is very common in India. There are probably 50 Samadhis in Tamil Nadu alone. This yogi is known as the river yogi, because about 30 years ago, the local people found him buried in the mud under the river, deep in meditation, when they were digging up some mud for building their houses. Then he opened his eyes and looked at them. They instantly realized he was not dead, but in Samadhi (a state of deep meditation and absorption with the Divine), so they brought him to their village, called Poondi. He is now known as Poondi Mahan, the saint of Poondi, and people can come to visit him and feel his darshan (blessings). The energy of his Samadhi was blissful, loving, and pure. Wow, what a day!

Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu

Above are pictures of a recording session in Chennai after my friend Sanjay bought some speakers from this amazing artist/musician. I asked if I could record a song, and he said yes. It's a rough cut, but it's my song all the same! Wow, serendipity happens again.
Below those pics are some photos of the friends from Seattle I am staying with in Tiruvannamalai: Sanjay, my neighbor from Wallingford, Gonga (with the white beard), and his wife, Tara.

I have reached a place where I could stay for a long time. I can only stay for four days now, then I am going to do a week of volunteer work with victims from a fire in another state, but then I think I will return again afterwards to soak up some of the amazing vibes of this place. I am staying for free with friends from Seattle who live here semi-permanantly. My neighbor, Sanjay, from Wallingford, introduced me to his friends Gonga and Tara who have started a temple here called Universal Fellowship of Light: All Saints Temple. This temple consists of one large room with photographs of many saints from all over India, as well as a spare bedroom/bathroom in the back. I am staying in that bedroom.

It's funny, because I thought I was coming to India for spiritual reasons. I thought I would meet some amazing yogis or medicine people, maybe learn from them or work with them. But mostly my trip has been about endurance, acceptance, patience, and about my relationship with myself. India is a hard place to travel in. It's tiring. It accosts you from all sides with offers to buy things, with poverty, with loudly bleeping buses and rickshaws, with children asking for money and pens, and with stares from men and women who are not ashamed to zap you with their eyes for many minutes without breaking their gaze. It's been amazing and tiring at the same time.

In south India, since I flew here from Delhi on Feb 14, I have spent all my time in Kerela, at beaches, soaking up the sun and the waves, at Amma's ashram singing devotional songs, in the mountains where they grow tea and spices, and at fishing towns eating my fill of fresh fish and prawns. I have been missing home, even though my time has been full of fun touristic activities. There comes a time, in the traveler's circuit, when visiting tourist places becomes more exhausting than fulfilling. I think I have reached that point, at least in India.

Then I came to Tiruvannamalai. I don't know, but something about the energy of this place is what I have been searching for all this time in India. I feel like I am arriving here too late, like I should have come directly here and not wasted so much time on the beach, etc etc. And staying with a friend, an American, a neighbor, for God's sakes, from Seattle, is comforting to say the least. Walking into the "All Saints Temple," I felt intuitively that I AM meeting these saints, finally. After all of this exhausting travel, I am finally connecting with why I came to India: for spiritual knowledge and illumination.

The mountain and the land itself are filling me with the calmest energy I've felt in my whole time in India. The sense of calm is also making me realize how tired I feel. I am excited and warmed by the homecoming that I sense, connected to the mountain itself, the energy of this place, and to seeing my friends from Seattle. The mountain's name is "Arunachala." It is known to be the actual abode of Lord Shiva, and many say it is the most sacred mountain in all of India. Pilgrims flock here every full moon to circumnavigate it. Many saints and yogis have and continue to make their lives here, meditating in hidden caves in the mountain or giving teachings in the nearby town. A guru who is famous in the West, called Ramana Maharishi, lived here in caves for many years, and now his ashram is also here. A verse in the Arunachala Mahatmyam, (taken from Wikipedia) translated from Sanskrit into Tamil by Sri Ramana Maharshi says:

"Arunachala is truly the holy place. Of all holy places it is the most sacred! Know that it is the heart of the world. It is truly Siva himself! It is his heart-abode, a secret kshetra. In that place the Lord ever abides the hill of light named Arunachala."[5]

Ramana Maharishi used to walk every day around Arunachala as a meditation, and says that "If you go round this hill it will give you its grace even you don't want it." It may sound cheesy, but I really feel that this is a sacred place. I don't just believe what everybody else is saying, I can FEEL the sacredness in my bones and in my blood. It feels like connecting my umbilical cord again with the universal, undying, infinite source of light.

Tomorrow morning, I am going with Sanjay, Gonga, and Tara to walk around the mountain. We plan to leave at 5 am to avoid the heat, and take the "inner path," the path that goes through nature and follows closely to the mountain. We wil walk slowly, in silence, "like pregnant women," as they say around here.

I finish this post with a heart that is open and waiting for grace. I know that grace is there, love is there, it's just coming slowly and gently into my tired body, like a dove settling into its nest after a long flight.

Writings on Love from Ammachi's Ashram

Love. There's something about it that we yearn for. Our heart is a magnet or a drain pipe always drawing love towards us. We can never forget love, once we've experienced it. Love touches us where we are most tender and innocent, where we forget to delineate the difference between self and other.

There is not always a way to escape from love. Sometimes the feeling is simply unavoidable - a white dove exploding from our chest in a flurry of feathers and breath. We don't know how it works. Sometimes love fills us with the most incredible ecstasy; other times it drains us until we feel as empty as a bowl with no fruit inside. Either way, love is a journey and a destination. It is a story in itself, being told through a network of many lives and many bodies.

Would love exist were there not bodies to feel it? Would love exist were there not an object to adore? Feeling love is the simplest, most beautiful thing on Earth, yet it has the capacity to attract many complications. Love without judgement is rare. Oftentimes love comes with more questions than answers - how do I express this feeling? Does this have to do with the other person, or with me? Will my heart be received or rejected?

Maybe John Steinbeck was right when he said, in "East of Eden," that the thing all humans are most afraid of is rejection. I can easily take trains by myself across India while relying on my innate strength and courage, yet it is more difficult for me to tell a man honestly about my tender feelings for him than it is for me to walk down a street full of beggars. I can hide inside myself when walking down the street, but I can't do that when I stand up for my feelings.

I would like to think that external courage begets internal courage. Where does the word come from, anyway? It comes from the word coeur, which means heart in French. Angeles Arrien interprets this to mean that courage implies standing by your heart. Being courageous doesn't need to have anything to do with journeying outside and away from yourself. In fact, it can be quite the opposite. It can require more courage to journey into yourself and see what lives there because there is no escaping yourself. When you are traveling, there is always the option of packing up and leaving a place if it does not suit you. With yourself, you are stuck. There is no one else who is going to rescue you. You are there all alone on your one little raft, floating on the endless sea of your own feelings. You can cry for help, maybe from God or from a trusted friend, and you can be blessed by grace. But you alone are the antagonist and the protagonist, the hero and the demon, or your own story.

In many ways, a new feeling of love requires us to shift our realities. Are we aligning with our own truth? Do we accept our own authorship of our lives, or do we shirk this responsibility off onto others through blame and judgement? Is there a new action, a change that is needed to reflect the feelings that we have inside our hearts?

I am always seeking to have my actions mirror my feelings. In this way, I draw out of myself all these internal escapades into a place where I can actually see them and interact with them in the real world of people and relationships, journeys and destinations. We are all called to do things which ask us to define who we are. In a way, we can define ourselves by our actions, by what we do with our time. This is not meant to be a judgement, only an honest perception of reality. How does time feel for us? Are we able to direct our own flow of time, or are we constantly following a schedule that was set for us by someone else? Do we even know why we do the same things day after day, without shifting the pattern? These questions can guide us into a higher state of self-awareness, so that we ensure we are the conscious leaders of our own lives.

Conscious leadership means being aware of all the factors which influence our choices, and knowing through some intuitive process that we are following our own truth. We don't have to see or understand all or ourselves to know we are on the right track. A self is a very infinite thing, and best perceived in terms of orbits and gravitational pull, rather than microscopes and the glare of a spotlight. We are all orbiting around something, and it is our job to become increasingly aware of our relationship to that something. What does the pull feel like? How does it influence our direction? When do we slow down, and when do we charge forward? These are all things which have to do with our center of gravity in relation to the mass or density of what we are orbiting around.

As we explore the various spinoffs of our central orbit, we come to understand what we are made of. This is something we can never truly see. John O'Donohue speaks of the human soul as something which can never be seen in an objective way, only felt and sensed by the subtle energies of the heart. When we get a glimpse of what we are made of, we get very excited. Our ecstasy begins to increase, along with our great love of empty spaces, epic stories, heroes and heroines, and things which call us into life. We don't have to forget anymore. With one whiff, we are resurrected from the threat of a life lived outside ourselves, and we want to know more. Where does this power come from? Is it mine? Can I cherish is? Can I grow this garden which I so adore? Can I cultivate the garden of my own soul?

And so begins the journey of a thousand lifetimes. A gardener's work is never finished. There is always something more beautiful to plant, another garden party to organize. In the same way, we are never finished with the exploration of our own souls. Would we really ever want to be? There is a sheer magic about new light dawning, of untold stories emerging from the shadows, of inviting new friends over to share a plate of soul food. I think it is a great gift that we can never truly see ourselves, for it allows us to go on exploring our frontiers until the end of time.

You might think this a lonely enterprise, this never-ending search for truth. But you see, truth is there all along. It never leaves. It is always guiding you, helping and consoling you along life's slippery waterways. The fact that we can never fully see ourselves allows us to grow closer to other beings who can then reflect the light of our own truth back to us. We can then see, through their eyes, what we are made of and how we grow into more beautiful and magnificent forms.

The gift of life is the gift of relationship. Without multiplicity we could never live this story which is so tantalizingly unfolding. There is no need to rush. We can be here, fully present, fully aware of our own role and our journey. After all. love is a feeling, and feelings take time to explore. Love is something we keep communicating, day after day. We keep giving it, we keep receiving it. In doing so, we nourish the very roots upon which we stand. When we remember to communicate love, we remember why we are here. Let us keep remembering. In our own unique ways, let us keep approaching the blinding light of our souls to weave the fabric of time back together.

Aho! Namaste.
Melissa