My new blog is here:

http://www.nondualitynow.com

Pay me a visit and sign up for the feed. It'll be worth your while!

Thanks and love,
Vicki

You get to the high places by way of the low....

I had a transformative experience this weekend. I flew to Memphis for the memorial service of my aunt. It was a time, of course, for a family reunion, and our little family was in need of it. My aunt lived to be 97, so we all knew she had lived a full life.  After the graveside service, we gathered at a beautiful park for a picnic. 

I took my copy of LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT. I passed it around and asked everyone to actually lay hands on it and I told them my prayer for the book—that it would find its way into the hearts of those that were open to receive it. My sister-in-law wanted me to autograph her copies and I said I couldn’t since she was out of town. “I’ll order the books, mail them to you, you sign them and mail them back to me,” she said firmly. I looked at her with wonder and she said, “Vicki, it’s a family thing.” I was moved.

My sister’s birthday was the next day and we all had brunch at Brennan’s of New Orleans. The food was ambrosial. At the picnic my cousin, whose mother we had memorialized, had served us the best barbecue on earth (Memphis, Tennessee) I realize some of you will argue with that, but I have a bully pulpit here in which I proclaim Memphis barbecue to be the best. We ended with an Italian dinner at a marvelous restaurant called Pete and Sam’s. Their barbecue pizza has been featured on The Food Network. My son got his picture taken with Mr. Sam, who is in his eighties and holds court at the register, where he rings up most of the sales.

Our flight back to Atlanta was yesterday morning. My son said, “Do you want to stop by the cemetery again?” I said. There was a crystalline blue sky. We walked over to the family plot, me holding LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT  in my hand.  Rob, my son, had his camera in the trunk and I asked him to go get it. Then I placed the book on my husband’s grave marker and asked Rob to take a photo. 

“I’ve been finding pennies, heads up, recently,” he said. “ I intended to leave one on each grave after the memorial Saturday, but didn’t, so I’ll put a penny on Dad’s grave and Laurie’s (his younger sister.) The wind had picked up, so he put the penny on the book to hold the cover down before he took the picture. We stood there in silence for a few moments and savored the symbolic completion of the little book's journey. After all, it has its roots in the loss of the beloved. Then I moved the book to my daughter’s grave and we repeated the process there.

“Look,” I said, pointing to the sun. Light was breaking through the gigantic oaks. It resembled the book’s cover photo, which was taken in Norway. He took some shots of the trees and sun and I knew this day in the life of my little book was transformative. The roots of the book lay within my heart and the light was breaking through the clouds of illusion. It had been a long journey on the horizontal level and a wink in the eye of eternity.

As we drove to the airport, I left with a heart full of peace and gratitude. You reach the high places by way of the low.

http://www.booklocker.com/books/4931.html

How Sorrow  Gave Me The Gift Of Self-Kindness

I have not always been kind to myself. Like any other ego, I am capable of self-critiquing until the sky looks level. But my life took a sharp turn when I was thirty-two years old. My only daughter was diagnosed with a fatal cancer at the age of three. She became a patient at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and I became drenched in sorrow. Sopped in self-pity and rage, I nevertheless found the courage to help keep her alive for another three years.

 By the time she died, I was exhausted beyond belief and knew I had to go with. Our son was ten when she died and he, too, had been through the hell of losing his only sibling. We were isolated deeply in our bereavement. No one knew what to say or how to treat us. Some mothers told their children that Laurie had moved away. She had finished first grade, been a Bluebird and made innumerable friends. Sadly, their sorrow kept them from coming around.

But I was on the spiritual path and knew that my burning desire to walk on until the end would keep my spirit alive. I kept it to myself, however. Within ten years, I had found my teacher and devoted countless hours to studying what he taught. That I was the Self in all beings and that God was within. My heart, however, was not light, even though I was bathed in it. I had to move through the grieving process one painful day at a time. It seemed never ending.

Life went on. We moved into a new house and my spiritual studies deepened. But in 2000 my husband received his own fatal diagnosis and he was told he had less than three years left. Believe it or not, this was harder on me in some ways than my daughter’s death. I was older and my husband was my strength, or so I thought. Now I became his and I cursed the situation like you wouldn’t believe.  All of my inner work seemed lost. I wept until my face looked like a giant puff. But I  was determined to grow. And grow I did. I had to witness my anger, fear, denial, all of the stages of grief. I went through them during the four and a half years that he survived.

 At the end I was left with myself alone. And kindness began to move in me. Self-kindness. Mercy towards this woman who had lost half her family. It manifested powerfully. I began saying no to things I had no interest or energy in doing. I kept up my meditation and writing. I moved slowly through each day, as if I was teaching a child how to live. But the child was me. And I listened to her and comforted her. I played soft music to her at night when she couldn’t sleep. I lit candles for her and let her watch as much TV as she liked.

 It was obvious to me that self-kindness was a spiritual teaching. And so it is. And so I am flowering in the wilderness of sorrow. And learning that kindness, as Naomi says, follows sorrow as surely as new flowers follow the rain.

You may buy my book at Booklocker.com.http://www.booklocker.com/books/4931.html

Selling this book one heart at a time. May it come into your life if it is meant to be.

Dear Readers,

LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT is available for sale at 
http://www.booklocker.com/books/4931.html

 I have spent all summer working on it. Those of you who are regulars know the story well, but now people who don’t know me can read it and hopefully embrace it. I have certainly given it my all and know that light surrounds it as it goes out into the world.

Someone gave me a reading almost two years ago in which she saw the book already written. This encouraged me to bring it to reality on the physical plane. I had lived it; now I needed to make it available to others. Bob Woodyard, I am sure, is keeping a benevolent eye on it from on high, since it is his story as well. Love does not end with the death of the body but grows richer by the physical absence. I  know that.

Here is a piece of good news. I am beginning work on a new website. This one is almost ten years old and in need of some sprucing up. My outlook has matured in some ways and remained the same where it counts. I want the new site to be a place that encourages regulars, people who can help spread the word about it, people that believe in what I do. That helps and blesses me no end. Right now I have no way of getting comments and the site will allow for that. I will keep bobwoodyard.com up and running for now while I am figuring out what bells and whistles to put on the new one. 

My life is very simple and the website will continue to reflect that. No reason for jargon when direct contact with reality is at hand. Let me hear from you....and please order a copy of Life With A Hole In It.

Love, Vicki

I have made the astounding discovery that I am not a neoadvaitist. Duh! That is just not a girdle I want to wear. The love handles of my bhakti disposition aren’t comfortable within the confines of an Indian philosopy adopted by westerners as their very own. Oh, I agree that “I am” is the most powerful sentence ever uttered; but it, of itself, can be merely a sentence that sends you to parroting jail.

Inside that jail are the parrots of parsing that dominate online nonduality. Polly wants a cracker and needs someone to put a file in it so she may escape. The bars of “I am” are restrictive if only intellectually squawked.

Wholeness is a term I prefer. In my wholeness I resonate with who I am. Perhaps I will always be a plus size in comparison to the runway  models of advaita. 

Right now the parrots are squawking madly in the cage. Bring it, birds, for I am about to fly away.

I did Jerry Katz's radio show, Nonduality Street. Listen here. It's half an hour of entertainment. Give it a listen.

Musical Coda

I don't know if anyone is reading the blog these days. I may quit it altogether since I have the website that people can visit.

Anything I say here is usually said there as well. The only virtue of this blog is that people can comment. But few have found it.

My writing is musical and always has threads of sorrow and grace running through it. I didn't realize that until I wrote a little humor piece for someone  and she said, "It's so musical!" And I realized that is how I approach my writing and speaking. As if I were playing the keyboard of my Mac or speaking music into the air. I like rhythm, tempo and the emotions I can evoke in that way.

Any comments?

Spirituality and Loss

In our culture, grief and loss are often ignored, particularly in online nonduality. I became a writer while in the process of losing my husband to a fatal cancer. I, apparently, was the only one going through such an ordeal that was willing to write about it. It was considered poor form by many whose main goal was to rise above all personal identification.

But these days I notice that more and more nonduality proponents are undergoing necessary losses and being more open about it. That is a good thing, for awareness of grief is the same as awareness of not-grief. The witness does its job and the personal self, although essentially unreal, is in the dark night of the soul. Someone needs to notice because the veil has temporarily dropped.

We are all the characters in the greatest story ever told. When we have someone beloved in the valley of the shadow, we are personifying grief and loss. When Jesus goes into the tomb, we are Him as a person. When Mary cries for the loss of her Friend, we are her. And when she sees Him in his new body, we are both Mary and the Christ. It is all a teaching vehicle. But let us never forget that we are learning conscious compassion. It is poor form to say that Mary should have known better.

When I write about my inner life of moving through grief and beyond, sometimes I am amazed that I am still here and in a new place. It no longer feels raw and unbearable. I move through my life in an emptier way, but empty is my new fullness. Every evening as I do my stretching exercises at the foot of my bed, I gesture to the place where my husband used to sleep. I speak a word to him and a word to me, as if both of us were together in that place. I am comforted to know that we actually are. I am not sure what place we left behind, but where we are now is good enough.

I know you are already wondering what place I mean. It is hard to articulate but I will try. It is that place that has lived through the crucifixion and the resurrection of the personal. It is bittersweet and hard-won. It has gone through the valley of the shadow and become the shadow and the light. What it is now is whole and unreachable. Pure and stained with all that has touched the glory. Willing to give up dreams of perfection. Going on because every step was necessary. Every step was leading back home.

Not much goin' on here down south. I made some lemon blueberry scones that are to die for. Yesterday it was Chai cookies. Too hot to be out stirring around. So the stirring is in the mixing bowl.

Here's a homemade essay from scratch: Enjoy with a scone and cup of tea.

Resting In the Real

Resting in the real underlies everything we do, so why do we resist letting go of what is unreal? It is the unreal that clings to the unreal. The aphorism “Cling nowhere” is something that sounds downright wise, but we are too busy clinging to investigate it. Our monkey minds have very long tails and busy little paws.

There is a What If factory in my mind that is never short of workers. Thousands of thoughts hire thousands of other thoughts to manufacture What Ifs all day long. The irregulars are given away. What are some of the irregulars? What Ofs, What Fors, What Nows. You can drop by the factory and take home an armload for nothing. 

In my particular What If factory, awakening is a primary product. What if I was awake and what if I was enlightened are popular products. What if I stay asleep and what if I die before I wake sell well to the  advaita market.

The What If factory never suffers a downturn in sales unless an enlightenment seminar comes to town. And then, look out. For about a week, the factory has to let some thoughts go. That is because enlightenment is not about thought and What If is only a thought. I don’t like to admit it, but What If is a fearmonger disguised as a useful business. And I am running it in my head!

Down below the head is the heart, the original mattress factory. Here I rest in the real.

Vicki Woodyard

What I Know (Written around the table at Cancer Wellness)

I know how to cut to the chase–

To lay my heart bare to the bone.

To stand my ground as it slips away

Knowing I will fly at just the right time.

I know my pain and so I know yours

and I know how to lift the load.

I know how to settle into peace and

how to sleep at night.

I know nothing about anything that

isn’t true to my little, beating fleeting heart.

It’s all written there scratched out by a dime

I found in my pocket.

Vicki Woodyard

A Ballet Of The  Soul 

I see life as a ballet of the soul. In spite of crisis, boredom, ennui, tragedy, grace of the soul is being danced across the ages. It is an eternal rhythm that is subtly experienced. Believe it or not, this dance is not done by anyone that we know ourselves to be. It is the part of us that is immanent and transcendent. It knows nothing of sweat or toil. It’s only job is to express what IT is. And what it is is grace beyond measure.

We sit at the table drinking coffee and ruing what we did or didn’t do. We go to sleep and wake with aching heads and remember bad dreams. We don’t know how we got here or when we will leave. And the dance is happening. We work and rest and act the part we have been given to play. And the dance changes step and rhythm and lifts us up over the fog and lets us see the stars.

And when the dance needs a partner it finds one. And then it may leave that partner at the altar or by some violent act. And we denounce the dance. Indeed the mystery of the dance is that it is anonymous. No one there can claim to be anything but a dancer of what is the dance of life. And all too soon a silence falls upon the floor. And then it is that the dance begins on another stage in another universe. We sigh and go on. And then once again we find ourselves taken up by a new rhythm. And the dance finds us a new partner. And so it goes.


I found this astonishingly beautiful clip...please watch it.

June 16, 2010--Well, folks, everyone is out in the sun doing summery things. And it isn’t even summer yet. Here in Atlanta everyone is baking. Swami Z is too hot to bake. I haven’t seen him lately. As far as my book, I am going to take a deep breath and have it edited. I didn’t plan on having anyone edit it but myself, but it has been suggested...so I am looking for an editor now.

I have made some new MP3’s but the last one I posted, The Crate, got so few listeners that I might as well save them for another time. If anyone is itching to hear a new one, hit the Donate button and I will upload them :) Editors aren’t free and I am scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point. But one day I will have that book available for you, hopefully in a couple of months.

In the meantime, go to the stillpoint and listen to some symphonic silence. I do.

Love, Vicki

The Fall

I fell into the darkness seeking light. Oh, it was a terrible, bone crushing landing. The pieces of black sky and the dark waters of midnight swept over me and I was gone, lost in the land of mechanical introspection. The professor who tutored me in this place was called Nameless.

Soundless was Professor Nameless and my inner screams were magnified a thousand fold. I was searching my mind for a route of escape and the harder I searched, the darker it got. Where was the fair land of enchantment called enlightenment? Had the professor hidden it under a diabolical rock?

And then the winds of despair began to whip over me. My lips were parched and my throat closed around the words, God, help me. Nothing was heard now and the professor had disappeared into the midnight.

Suddenly something occurred to me. I turned around and began to walk away from myself. I had no other direction in which to go, you understand. From that point on I was enveloped in grace. It didn’t matter if I made my escape from darkness or not. The “I” seeking escape was left behind. I walked out a free spirit. I turned one last time to scan the darkness and all I saw was light.

Today my daughter would have been 39. Coincidentally (?) I sent my manuscript in to be formatted for publication. I have gone over it a jillion times and had to make a firm decision to STOP and be good enough.

No one is reading this here blog. Is it that dull? Is everyone going to my website instead. Does it really matter?

What really matters is that we are all living our passion. And I am doing that. Mine burns with a low, steady flame. I love being with the silence and writing as I am moved to do so.

I cherish an ordinary day filled with nothing but the day itself.

At night I love to settle in and watch TV. Right now I am watching So You Think You Can Dance....I love dance.

So that's it from the bottom line of everything's fine.

Love,
Vicki

I Am Not My Thoughts; I Just Think I Am

Beyond the mind, there is a place of deep silence. Cross the borders of the mechanical crankings of thought and enter there. See if you can stay longer than a few seconds. The monkeys guarding the gate know that you are apt to leave silence and become them. They know the score.

Once you are a monkey, you go ape. You swing through the jungle of your wild emotions and scattershot thoughts  like it would do you any good. And your eye is on the silence, you will return there any moment now. There is a nice ripe banana that is distracting you. But you will return to silence after that.

Comes the day when the pain of thought is cracking your heart wide open. It may be a disgrace, a shame or a loss. Never mind what it is; it is the event that causes you to make a vow to cross the border once again.

The silence says nothing about your return. It offers itself to you with generosity and you say a silent prayer. This is your home, your essence, your grace. Perhaps it knows how you meant to return, how you suffered when you thought you were your thoughts. But it says nothing. What happens in silence stays in silence.

You Are Bigger Than The World

You are bigger than the world...yes, you. We all have a sense of this when we come into the planet for our sojourn as such and such a personality. By the time we are in our teens, we have somehow come up with a pretty permanent character to play. And yet, for all the protection it seems to offer, we are constantly in conflict with ourselves.

The spiritual path opens up before us when we come to understand that this conflict can never be resolved by thinking about it. On the contrary, the more we think, the more we sink down into the morass of our egos.

When I began studying with Vernon Howard, he was living in Boulder City, Nevada. He chose it, I think, because it was isolated and in the desert. You really had to make an effort to arrive in his presence. I went for the first time, guided by a dream. I had been listening to one of his audio tapes and knew I needed to see him in person.

He was, in a word, formidable. He allowed no room for anyone to argue with him intellectually. His job was to back our personas into a corner and he did an excellent job. By the same token, his job was also to confirm what our intuition was saying about him. With me, this happened in dreams, in things that students would say to me, and by synchronicity.

He never lied. And it is worth all the effort a student makes to be in the presence of someone without guile. Someone who knows the ego is rotten to the core and bent on keeping its so-called owner in hell. 

I am a lifelong student of truth and luckily for me, I always carry that with me, regardless of any ego shenanigans I might be up to. My husband was a student of truth as well. As some of you know, I have written many essays about our experiences as he bravely faced his death from multiple myeloma. Recently he came to me in a dream. It was wonderful and sad at the same time. That is how the path goes. It’s not about roses, roses, but about roses and thorns. Our egos are thorns that we must reckon with. Our true nature shines on.

There is a new MP3 on Audio 2010. Something about The Bars of Thought...

Just uploaded When The Mind Falls Away on Audio 2010 . Give it a listen. I like it. 

Dear Bob,

Everything is coming together at last. The book is finished. Within the last two weeks, both Rob and I had someone run into our cars and they are both in the body shop. He is walking there right now to pick mine up until I can find a new one. Mine is totalled, but they are going to straighten it out just enough so that I can drive it until I get a new one.

I feel this is a purging of sorts. I cannot feel one negative thing about it. I have learned the lesson well. That no matter what happens, choosing to go through it consciously is the only way out. And when we don’t do that, we are still forgiven.

Our love is fixed in the firmaments. You know that. Just as you know that I am doing fine. Better than fine. Although there are days when I may get discouraged, most of the time I feel my purpose in life is being fulfilled. My writing benefits me first and foremost; and hopefully, a few others.

So it’s on with the book, my love. A new chapter in my life is about to begin and I look forward to it. Of course, time is a illusion, but so are we, so is two-ness. There is only the One.

Love,

Vicki

For the great mystery is contained within us. It is flowing like wine and congealing like aspic. It is breaking our self-concepts into smithereens and dashing us into the pilings of the cosmic pier. The tsunami of the Self is bearing down on us and we are rushing for cover. No more time for tweeting and blogging and texting while we drive. Too late. It’s always too late.

How ironic. After posting the essay yesterday, a lady ran into the left rear side of my car in the grocery parking lot today. Crrrunch. Bang. Reread the paragraph above and make your own conclusions.

I have been so caught up in working on my book that I have not taken the time to enter the flow of intuitive writing, which I love to do. So I am going to clear my head and do that before something else snags my feeble little mind.

I have this to say. In spite of loss and sorrow and not wanting to go on alone, I have, I have. I have conquered innumerable fears for no other reason than it was time. The flow carries us even against our wills. What a mystery we are enacting while we brush our teeth and then eat chocolates before bed. When we strain at gnats and swallow camels. And truffles. And that is who we are.

And who we are not.

For the great mystery is contained within us. It is flowing like wine and congealing like aspic. It is breaking our self-concepts into smithereens and dashing us into the pilings of the cosmic pier. The tsunami of the Self is bearing down on us and we are rushing for cover. No more time for tweeting and blogging and texting while we drive. Too late. It’s always too late.

And there is never enough time to turn our lives around by taking thought. That bus pulled out of the station long ago.

And so we fritter our lives away while cancer or AIDS or whatever is taking someone’s life tonight. And somewhere hearts are breaking and stomachs are tight with dread and nurses bring pills and patients go suddenly quiet and leave on a mystery train.

And who we are suddenly kicks in.  And we do something great. Or not. And maybe a crack opens up in our psyche and an angel wings past it and we feel a chill.  And then we know that we are not alone.

And that we are standing on holy ground and wearing mismatched socks and it’s okay.

And so it goes.

Yesterday my son took some pictures of me. Thought I'd post one.
I knew he'd have to be patient with me since it was Mother's Day. Been feeling good about the book I'm trying to finish. Hopefully it will open a new chapter in my life. I was told I would do this, and it's taken a while for me to realize the dream.

I'm getting excited about the publication of my first book. I'll let you know when the title is locked in. The manuscript is all but finished. In any enterprise, tying up loose ends is the hardest thing because you save the thorniest problems for last. They are not always the biggest, either.


It is, essentially, the story of the five years that as a spiritual student, I struggled with my husband's impending death. Perhaps I feel better because I know how proud he would be that I actually finished it. He was my biggest champion, of course.


There are many things that I couldn't include. Between the lines of the essays lies the heart of the story. Bigger issues than life and death, even. Issues about the soul's purpose in taking a human birth.


I hope to write a follow-up to it in which I write more about how I live my life these days. The essays are already written, for the most part. It is the stringing them together that's the challenge.


Love, Vicki

Went to a Dreams and Mindfulness Session today at Cancer Wellness. Half a dozen of us sat around the table with two facilitators and went into a centered space and shared dreams. This is the most wonderful place. It's my experience that these wellness centers offer more than satsang. They offer a place of continued connection with who you really are. And they are free to cancer patients and family members.


At some point my spiritual path converged with wellness and those two things are working as one.


If the light of the body is the eye, the light of the spirit is "I."


Sometimes disease humbles us like nothing else will. Ironically, the cancer patients that I know are taking care of their spiritual lives better than many so-called spiritual students. The lines blur as the eyes fill with tears.

The Mental Pause

I am going through the Mental Pause. Not the menopause. This comes about the same time, though. Some advaitists teach this as an actual principle, can you imagine? They would have us do this on purpose! They advocate being in a room and staying with the emptiness. Not wondering why you came into the room in the first place. Was it to get some peanut butter or to defrost the refrigerator. Do Zen masters have this problem. Do they just sit and forget stuff, like milk and bread on the way home from the zendo. Are there patriarchs of peanut butter?

The old master sat with

his tongue stuck to the roof

of his mind.

Yum.

I am an advocate of all things tasty, fresh and good for you. I just can’t always remember it. So I end up eating Fritos and Cheetos and Cheeze Whiz and Cocoa Puffs with whole milk instead of soy or almond milk. I am like that in my impermanency. My thoughts are definitely impermanent. That is perhaps why I cannot finish what I start. War and Peace, to me, might include installments of Tvgasm.com and Facebook pages of my nearest and dearest jillion friends. I don’t Twitter because I don’t have time for the inanity. Stop the inanity. Now there’s a good Tweet.

The new master sat

with his iPad

watching the old frog

plop into the virtual pond.

Blog. Tweet.

As I travel through the badlands of this essay on the old gray mare of my mind, I suddenly decide to alight and encamp among the blog rushes growing wild around the virtual pond. Soon I am lost in thoughts of assorted and sundry enlightened ones blogging about their spiritual virtuosity. The reeds and clarinets of awakened egos are suddenly giving me a headache of monstrous proportions. Before I know it, I will be just another nondual celeb faking it until I am making it.  So onto the final haiku:

I dismantled my walking stick today

and sat down on the ground of my being.

Ouch.

Vicki Woodyard

http://www.bobwoodyard.com

Dear Readers, I have been in the throes of putting a manuscript together. I couldn’t come up with the right title and that was driving me crazy. I knew I hadn’t found the exact one. But last night it came to me. I won’t say what it is quite yet, but it is exactly right. I asked Swami Z what to call it. As some of you know, he is a fictional character that gives me full access to my heart. You may wonder how a piece of fiction can help me. Well, we are all fictional characters playing our roles on the stage of life.

I haven’t been posting many updates lately and probably no one cares. For those of you who do, I am still here...just working behind the scenes.

I write an essay from time to time or upload an MP3 I have recorded. Here is a brand-spanking new one called The Noisy Mind on Audio 2010 . If you can donate, please do so. Thank you for your presence in my life.

Love, Vicki

Just uploaded Inside Outside on Audio 2010 . I thought I better get a new MP3 up before I forgot how to make them. I hope you will give it a listen. It’s brief, as always. But brief doesn’t mean it’s without depth.

I may have to scrap the blog....most people are visiting my website instead.

It's address is Nurturing the Now .

Blogging is a funny thing. Some like it and some don't. Since my homepage has been up and running for so long, I thought a blog might be an interesting addition, but.....we shall see.

I was waiting to go to the dentist and just idling around the house. I went over to the bookcase and pulled out a book at random, which was Jonathan Livingston Seagull. An index card fell out of the book. In Bob’s shaky writing was printed these words: "By His stripes we are healed."

Another sign that he is with me as I try and polish my manuscript about our journey together. I am not sure how to interpret that Bible passage. To me, it is saying that by my husband’s sufferings, I am healed. For he surely went through devastation after devastation and bore them all with great dignity. All of his ribs broken from the cancer, all of his bone marrow infiltrated by it, he finally bled to death one drop at a time. In hospice, his nose bled for days until finally his heart stopped. There had been months of transfusions of blood and packed platelets to keep him alive, but finally the doctor said it was time to quit. He didn’t want to go; he wanted to stay as my protector. He asked me if I would ask the doctor to sign him out of hospice and put him back into the hospital.

“Yes, I can do that, if that is what Bob wants,” he said. But Bob died before that happened.

Five years later, an old index card falls out of an inspirational book. I sit and hold it in my hand. I read a bit from the book. “The only true law is that which leads to freedom,” Jonathan said. “There is no other.”

A friend had recommended that I get the book and read it to Bob as he was making his transition. He was never that interested; I suppose he was too weak to pay much attention. So it has been in the bookcase all these years. I have gotten rid of hundreds of spiritual books, but that is one that has remained. And I am so glad.

I Am Paring Down

This morning I sat in my comfy brown leather recliner and had at it. I pulled up a wooden wastebasket and began my work. I said “I am” and left it at that. The silence felt as silky smooth as a Dove Bar.  But that was not why I sat down to work. I was going to run through a pile of self-descriptive adjectives and then toss them in the trash.  

For example, I said to myself, “I am bigger than my body.” and so I tossed the words “my body” into the trash. Next I said, “I am bigger than my emotions,” and tossed the words “my emotions” into the trash. I was left with simply “I am.” You get the picture.

It was easy to come up with descriptive adjectives because this was a conscious exercise in self-awareness. It is not so easy to do when you are sleepwalking through your life or when you are in a crisis.  When my husband was dying from multiple myeloma, the adjectives around “I am” became as thick as an animal’s winter coat. “I am terrified of losing him. I am afraid I won’t be strong enough. I am angry at the cancer. I am trying hard to do the right thing. I am desperate for a good night’s sleep.”

All of those words and phrases hovering around “I am” reduced me to a pile of mush even though I was on the spiritual path. I was defenseless around a pile of adjectives. I began a correspondence with a man named Peter who was quite ill from a series of strokes. He could barely get around and yet he told me he was “bigger than the sky.”

After his strokes, he found that the old pile of adjectives around him did him no good. “I am a good-looking man, a man’s man,” he told me once. And yet he found himself unable to walk down the hall to the bathroom for two years running. The new adjectives people were using were not particularly helpful.  Strings of words like “poor prognosis, stroke victim, unable to work” were now applied to him.

He went to spiritual teachers and found them to be useless. “They could not help me,” he said. “They simply did not know how.” So he did the only thing he was able to do. He sat in the sunshine with a little cat named Alex on his chest. The cat’s purrs, in lieu of a nursing staff, conveyed to him the healing power of nature. He watched the robins run across the grass because they were what he saw. He was grateful in the most basic way. And he began to realize that what he had found was the living experience of himself. No adjectives need apply. And so I sat in my leather recliner in perfectly good health, and remembered that I was not who I thought or felt I was. I simply was.

By the end of the morning I had a wastebasket full of  words that seemed to describe me. I was bigger than any of them. I knew what Peter knew, that I was bigger than the sky. I was bigger than anything that could be named or described. Peter is no longer among us and yet he lives within all who loved him. How does he do this? I was never sure how Peter did anything but feel the joy of the moment. “When I in  pain, I yell. And when I fall down, I say “ho ho.” But he never latched onto anything. He learned to hold on to “I am” and it became stronger than any stroke could ever be.

He had had a brilliant career and then he had almost no memory of who he was or who his friends were. He couldn’t make change. But he sure made a difference. You see, the “I am” that we all are is indestructible. It is too bad we don’t learn this unless we are reduced to helplessness. In Peter’s case, he saw through the illusion of having a separate self. He realized that no matter where he found himself, he was bigger. And that brought him joy that few of us will ever know.

When I take a walk around my neighborhood, I often see the robins running across the grass. My heart opens to the understanding that Peter gave me. “I am” bigger than anything. I am bigger than the sky.”

Vicki Woodyard

http://www.bobwoodyard.com

Mar. 16, 2010--Just uploaded True Love Waits on Audio 2010 . It’s about true self-love, which is the last frontier. We don’t turn to it until we have been thoroughly trashed by the illusion that somewhere out there it is waiting for us. No, it is within that we find it. Charity begins within.

Haven't gotten any donations for the month of March.  Should you care to donate, now is the time. The word goes out from me faithfully and what comes in is up to God, but the begging bowl is out :)

A Whiter Shade of Pale

In the end it all comes down to nothing. A baby toddling toward its mother, a graduate receiving his diploma, an old man reaching for his walker, a tearful son or daughter standing over a grave. Why do we try so hard and go so wrong when all that is needed is self-love? What makes us watch our dismal mental movies of failure over and over and never think to get up and leave?

We believe we are powerless in a world gone mad. We feel terrible because we are “not good enough.” But by whose standards are we judging ourselves. Why do we watch TV in order to feel worse about ourselves. Why do we rush to purchase deodorant and just the right new car when inwardly we are parched for pure water? We have Bibles and other holy books close at hand where the truth is laid out for us. We say we believe and yet we feel miserable. Whose fault is it but our own? And how do we mend a broken heart, as the song asks.

A young woman with cancer has just lost her brother to the war and her sister to cancer. What words of wisdom will comfort her? Platitudes are useless and true comforters stand powerless as well. What would I say to that young woman?

Only silence offers solace at times like these. A holy hush that admits that as humans, we can never know the final truth until we become so one with it that our very being is a healing.

"Everything is foreseen by the higher Self.

And still we buck and fight against

what is forged of destiny and cannot be escaped

except through love."

Vicki Woodyard

Nothing in our lives happens by chance; we just think it does. When I was studying with Vernon Howard, I would frequently have precognitive dreams about my visits there. They told me that I was on the right path even when it felt wrong. And it almost always felt wrong to my ego. But since the ego is an illusion born of the belief that we are separate, why listen to it?

We listen to it because we are afraid. We are also afraid of society with its message to conform. Society preaches love and delivers hate, preaches joy and delivers misery. And yet we stay, in the vain hopes that it will, one fine day, deliver what we have been waiting for. 

The only way out of delusion is awareness.

Once in awareness, we see with clear vision, that we are the Self.

And the Self is love incarnate.

My friend Connie Caldes is a gifted shaman. She has journeyed for me on occasion and each time it is an enriching

experience.  She did a soul retrieval for me today and I wrote about it in the poem below. Her website is

Shamanic Dreamtime .

A Piney Wood

The little girl inside of me walks a piney path

following herself home to a hollow tree.

Owl mother beams at her joyfully

as she kneels to crawl into the hole of

the old tree.

Little girl cares for owl babies

until her heart softens into sunlight

and she listens to the wind through

the pines.

Owl mother and her babies,

little girl inside of me all

feeding on love that cares

for all that live.

Now the little girl has returned

to live with me in my grownup home

where I listen to her until my

heart grows warm and melts like wax.

Vicki Woodyard