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

Why I Write

I write because I must. Just like everything else I do, it is incomplete, unfinished in some primal way. I think we are all like that. Something is impelling us to move, to grow, to change and yet that something is as ineffable as the wind.

I consider the website a place for what must be to happen. So many years of plodding on, of wondering how much  longer I could stand things the way they were...and then suddenly I was out into the sunlight again. Alone. And with nowhere to go and nothing to do. I must be about my Father’s business.  And it isn’t selling or buying. What is it, then, that I must do now that I am standing alone and free?

Once I answer that question I can move on up the vertical ladder that we are all born to climb. While I pause on this rung, I am here breathing with you and listening for your voice. Or is it mine? Or ours?

Often I am awake in the wee hours like so many others are. Today is one of those nights :) I just ate a piece of toast and had some Ovaltine. And came in here to visit myself in the form of words to us all. One piece of advice I give myself:  Rest easy. The hard part of the journey is over.


Listen to Suffer Consciously on Audio 2010 .

A Year of Going Deeper

I made an MP3 called No Shit and it got more initial hits than any I have done to date. I like that. It tells me that my willingness to go deeper, to be more myself, has paid off. For those of you who have not listened, it is actually part of the love story between my husband and me. I was being broken on a daily basis and so was he.  Whoever orchestrated the event did not include

moonlight and roses.

That is the way of the cross. A long time ago I woke up from a dream where a woman was asking me if I would like to be a teacher. In the dream I said yes. The next part of the dream included my meeting an Indian guru. I asked him for his blessing and he put oil on my head. He asked me if I had a teacher and I said yes.

I don’t remember anything else that happened, but at the end, he said, “You may have some experiences. I have given you the cross.” He was an Indian, so that part of it was strange. But he had such a solemn expression on his face. Suddenly I woke from the dream and remembered those words with a shock. I felt the dream took place on the astral level.

In real life I had just met a mystic who was signing a copy of her book at a local book store. Bob had wanted to go and I told him I had too many books as it was. But at the last minute, I changed my mind and went. She was sitting there all alone, so we had ample time to talk with her. I told her about my teacher, who had recently passed away,  and she said, “Well, you had better be at the bus stop or it’s going to go on without you!”

“How did you know about the bus stop?” I asked. She looked at me and said “I don’t, but last night as I was meditating, I heard a voice say, “She better be at the bus stop....” I told her that

Vernon Howard’s last talk was about a young woman who wants to get back home. The moral of the  talk was that all she had to do was go to the bus station and ask for a ticket home. Everything else would be done for her.”

The mystic suggested that Bob and I might want to visit her. She lived in a small adjacent town. I was fascinated and in a couple of weeks we were sitting in her home. She said that when she heard the voice in her meditation, she saw a large silver bus with eyes all over it. “It was the safest thing that I have ever seen.”

We talked about the path for a long time. She said she had an Indian guru and that she had an inner guide that told her things. She was a beautiful, intelligent blond and seemed far ahead of me, although she was somewhat younger.

I called her a few days later. “You are very powerful,” she said, “I think you are being called.”

I was both thrilled and terrified by her words. I had never felt powerful in my life and yet I knew that I carried a calling deep within and it was to that she was referring.

“I don’t think I am a teacher,” I told her honestly. And that remains true to this day. I am comfortable writing and recording at home. Perhaps one day I will take the next step.

I had a wonderful friend and guide who passed over in December of 2007. He said I would have a  ministry of sorts but that at this point I was simply planting seeds. He felt the recordings were important for me to do and I have always made them without notes or prior thought.

This year is a time for going deeper; I hope you will join me here and on Nurturing the Now .

Coming...Vicki Woodyard on YouTube...if she gets up the nerve.

So I ordered a Flip HD to do videos with. I’ll keep them short and sweet and to the point, Because that’s how I roll. I also know my strengths and weaknesses and how little I have to do with either one of them. 

Today I whiled away the morning setting the little Flip up now here, now there. I cut off my head, moved out of range, coughed, flubbed what I said, etc.  Finally I got peevish and relegated little Flip to an assortment of end table debris.

I discovered a wonderful new blog today, http://www.gailstorey.com/ Gail Storey and her webmistress Amber, tickle my funnybone and warm my heart. Happily, some of us are called to do that and there is strength in numbers. I just wish I had a friend like Amber. I have Swami Z , but he ain’t no doll. If anyone should care to create a Swami Z doll, let me know. I will pay you in his homemade cookies 24/7 and 365. I will have him rock you to sleep and enlighten you as  to which makes the best disciples and the best cookies. He will claim to do both, but he is a tad senile.

So that’s the news from this part of virtual reality...


Love, Vicki

A Garden Of White

Twice in my life I have had my heart ripped from my chest. The first time it happened I was thirty-five years old. My only daughter died of a rare childhood cancer when she was seven.

The second time I was considerably older. My husband of thirty-eight years, minus a week, died of a fatal, incurable cancer--multiple myeloma. In between those two devastations, I began walking the spiritual path. Needless to say, it was uphill all the way. But somewhere deep in my soul, I was never bitter. Sorrowful, yes--bitter, no. I just wanted to find God so that He could answer some questions for me. Like “Why are you doing this to me?”

Oh, yes, I am a curious person and there is nothing like double sorrow to hone the edges of the question. It became a piercing point in my side, a crucifixion lance. I had to watch my husband slowly but surely lose his ability to make blood cells. Had to help him in and out of bed, had to make the decision to put him into hospice. Had to call on God for strength and mercy. He delivered.

Five years have now gone by since we laid him to rest. My tears have been transmuted into drops of light. As I type these words into the computer I feel their transformative power. Given to God, sorrow becomes soft rain to make the heart flower once again. This time I am expecting a garden of white.