Reiki Help Blog :: Oasis Reiki Dojo

It’s not certain if we’re at 2.0 or 3.0. What’s certain is that we need an update and upgrade. Our brain and neurology needs an upgrade, our mind too and our heart. In Buddhism there’s the concept of heart-mind. Ayya Khema tells us, “In Pali, heart and mind are one word (citta), but in English we have to differentiate between the two to make the meaning clear.” Pali is the language of many of the earliest Buddhist scriptures.

This teaching is a central one in Buddhism known as Bodhicitta, an awake heart-mind, or the heart-mind of enlightenment. In Tibetan psychology, the heart is synonymous with the mind. Tibetan worldviews are highly influenced by Buddhism, and consciousness, mental clarity, and the sense of self is known to rest in the heart. To put it simply, heart-mind points to a balance of wisdom and compassion, engaging both and giving both fair say in how we choose to live.

Today there are hopeful signs and utter chaos all at the same time. In the previous post I wrote: “At this very juncture, Earth’s and humanity’s narrative within it is being radically rewritten.” And: “We must participate in the emergent story of the Earth and humanity without the mistakes and limitations of the old one.” This observation is being made widely, and any thinking-feeling person can see the themes without trying too hard.

Robert Atkinson, Professor of Human Development and Religious Studies at the University of Southern Maine, writes:

Our collective story is lagging behind, resisting the flow of evolutionary change. The pre-twentieth-century story we have carried with us into the twenty-first century – built on the assumptions of duality, separation, and boundaries – has lost much of its meaning, power, and, most alarmingly, hope for the future. It faces crisis after crisis without offering any lasting resolution. The once well-understood principle of continual progress toward a collectively desired and beneficial goal is missing.

Soon after last month’s earthquake in Japan, Thich Nhat Hanh sent this message:

Dear friends in Japan,

As we contemplate the great number of people who have died in this tragedy, we may feel very strongly that we ourselves, in some part or manner, also have died.

The pain of one part of humankind is the pain of the whole of humankind. And the human species and the planet Earth are one body. What happens to one part of the body happens to the whole body.

An event such as this reminds us of the impermanent nature of our lives. It helps us remember that what’s most important is to love each other, to be there for each other, and to treasure each moment we have that we are alive. This is the best that we can do for those who have died: we can live in such a way that they continue, beautifully, in us…

This is a perfect example of balanced wisdom and compassion. The Japanese people give all of us hope. They have shown model behavior in the face of an ongoing triple disaster; earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear fallout. They are resilient, sharing resources and services, not being tempted to commit crime, and exercising neighborliness, altruism and hospitality. Make sure you watch this beautiful video (4/12/2011) to participate in healing for Japan.

The last sentence of Thich Nhat Hanh’s statement is deeply inspirational. Referring to those who’ve perished he says, “we can live in such a way that they continue, beautifully, in us…” For there to be any kind of continuation, we and the Earth first has to survive. “Beautifully” stands for so many things, but today let’s focus on the preservation of Nature and the Earth. Dr. Atkinson, again:

We need a new chapter in our evolving story that will restore hope, infuse new meaning into the wondrous process of creation, and unify our consciousness with a vision we intuitively trust. We need a story that keeps renewing itself.

2011 has so far shown that new narratives source in the most unlikely places. Adding to the surprise is the South American nation of Bolivia. According to The Guardian online, “Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as ‘blessings…’”

Let’s not be naïve enough to believe industry and politics is going to change overnight to bring about the New Earth. This is still a huge step in the right direction, one that leader nations are strongly resisting. Here’s the depth and breath of Bolivia’s The Law of Mother Earth.

In the Andean worldview there’s a central Earth deity known as Pachamama. The environment and Pachamama are considered central to all life, with humans being equal to all beings, not higher, but equal. The Guardian writes:

In the indigenous philosophy, the Pachamama is a living being.

The draft of the new law states: “She is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos. She is comprised of all ecosystems and living beings, and their self-organisation.”

This law reads like poetry! Bolivia’s Foreign Minister has also said:

Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals. We believe that everything in the planet forms part of a big family. We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food and financial crises with our values.

You can catch the full story here, including video about the impacts of climate change on Bolivia.

Bolivia gives us hope.

Joseph Campbell who was a master of myth and story isn’t alive today. He would have been a fascinating source for the meaningful interpretation of our times. Yet, with some prescience, the following is his contribution to us today:

We’re in a free fall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast. And always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. But all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective… Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes.

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© Pamir Kiciman 2010

Earth has been framed in many stories since its inception. Broadly, these are early creation myths, agrarian times, Flat Earth and being center of the universe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Modernism, and finally the scientific/technological age of globalization. At this very juncture, Earth’s and humanity’s narrative within it is being radically rewritten. It’s an emergent story, one that’s on the edge of the future and so in some ways unknowable. However, there are clear signs and indicators. The first quarter of 2011 has been extremely eventful and what these signs and indicators mean, or how we may utilize them in solution-oriented ways can be confusing.

We must participate in the emergent story of the Earth and humanity without the mistakes and limitations of the old one. In essence, humanity’s trajectory on Earth has been one of increasing ‘separation.’ We began with a healthy respect for Nature and working in harmony with her. The Earth was understood to be sacred. This remained true even as ideas of ‘mine’ and ‘ours’ crept in when everyone wanted to protect their land. We started to feel separate from each other, while still feeling one with Nature. As cities developed, humans spent less time outdoors. With the Industrial Age and its aftermath all the way to the present, our relationship with Nature and the Earth shifted from gratitude for resources to profit from resources.

This shift and science’s ability to measure only matter but not ‘life’ has established the worldview that creation is inert. Only humans are alive, but even then we can only love those who are the same as we are. Trees are alive, but they’re a commodity so clearcutting rainforests is permissible. Animals are alive, but they don’t have our intellect, so we can raise them solely to be slaughtered as food. A seed is full of life, but what it grows into can’t be shipped easily so we’ll modify it genetically. Oil is not alive, so it’s perfectly fine to drill and extract it with no end in sight. If the world around us is inert, if we live in a dead solar system, then a neighbor who’s ‘different,’ the extinction of a species, or the final demise of old growth forests is of little consequence.

Current world events, capped by the earthquake in Japan and military action in Libya are a giant call to awakening. We don’t know what may happen next. What we do know is that when a planet and its life forms become commodities only, stripped of all other intrinsic value, that planet is in dire danger. The New Earth can only emerge from the understanding that creation is in fact not inert, but teeming with sacred life.

This is the choice point we’re facing collectively. There’s a way to heal through our dilemmas. The Earth herself has wounds, as does humanity. Oneness is an ancient truth we must now adopt as our new narrative to heal. Oneness has always been Earth’s and humanity’s narrative. What’s needed now is its embodiment. Our task now is to permeate social, political, economic and scientific systems with it. A united Earth can step into a possible future that’s now emerging.

Oneness includes compassion, not only tolerance. It includes wisdom, not only intelligence. It includes nonmechanical power. It includes abiding inspiration and creativity. We need all of these to usher in the sustainable good of the future.

Although there have been massive undercurrents to what we’re seeing in the world today, events are at the same time spontaneous and self-organizing. This and the severity of upheaval all around the world is a sure sign of much needed global healing. We can make this a teachable moment for humanity. The world’s healing traditions hold the wisdom that change includes cleansing. Cleansing is a process of reconciliation. The unhealed must be processed. This means it’s acknowledged and understood first, which leads to acceptance and insight. Finally, higher functional states open up.

When creation is understood as living, honoring it comes naturally, and our acts become hymns to it instead of dirges. Will you emerge and merge with Earth’s and humanity’s new healing narrative?

© Pamir Kiciman, written March 2011

Each post for the Reiki Help Blog can take anywhere from 1-5 days to write/research, proofread/edit, and post with an appropriate image and formatting. If you leave this space with any value, knowledge, joy or understanding, please consider making a donation of your choice.

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© Pamir Kiciman 2010

Compassion is a quality of the awakened heart. The awakened heart is one which is healed and transcendent of petty concerns. The natural human capacity to feel for and with others is where compassion begins. Compassion circumscribed by one’s immediate family and friends is an imitation of itself. It never quite peaks and can lead to narrow self-interest, and thus conflict. Compassion isn’t only love, kindness, empathy, or altruism. It’s a combination of these, making it entirely different. It must break the shores of personal concerns before it can truly become itself. Attached compassion is not really of much use to anyone.

True compassion brings with it a clear awareness. This awareness is abiding, as is compassion. Both are sourced in the same origin. Compassion and awareness engender each other. Awareness can open the heart to bigger compassion, and compassion can open the mind to greater awareness. This is the power and effectiveness of working with abiding qualities; they’re efficient and direct.

Compassion elevates both  the bearer of it and its recipient. Because it sources from an abiding place, true compassion is effective in an endless sphere. Likewise, compassion is very practical and not reserved for highlight moments. It’s an everyday companion and a peak experience all at once.

Compassion has to begin in spiritual contemplation and practice. It’s there that whatever needs to be healed in our humanity can be healed. We’re born with a good heart. Living can bake a crust on it. It’s also not necessarily an awakened heart at the start. Thus there’s inner work to be done. To awaken the heart to its true nature is extremely rewarding because it returns us home, and reveals our best in all areas.

Compassion at the human level is better than any of its opposites. Compassion that’s harvested from its universal source by personal inner practice is inestimably valuable. This is the compassion we must tap and share widely.

Compassion is the ultimate and most meaningful embodiment of emotional maturity. It is through compassion that a person achieves the highest peak and the deepest reach in his or her search for self-fulfillment.  —Arthur Jersild

What’s often missed with compassion is that it’s also a tremendous source of strength. An eternal resource such as compassion is solid and far-reaching. It brings with it other timeless qualities and informs our human experience on all levels.

Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair but manifestations of strength and resolution. —Kahlil Gibran

How have you accessed compassion, how has it instructed you and where have you applied its goodness?

Each post for the Reiki Help Blog can take anywhere from 1-5 days to write/research, proofread/edit, and post with an appropriate image and formatting. If you leave this space with any value, knowledge, joy or understanding, please consider making a donation of your choice.

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© Pamir Kiciman 2010

Healers hold for individuals, and by accumulation for everyone, the shared story of the human journey. With each encounter, what it is to be human emerges more and more, until there’s a fuller view. With each encounter, the common sufferings and dilemmas of existence are revealed. Our joys are shared too. Some of these themes are universal and some contemporary to the current age. In the previous post on listening I wrote, “In true listening there’s an unmistakable recognition.” This is a witness state.

Being a witness in this sense is the quality of being in stillness and silence inwardly. No demands are being made. The demand that the story you’re receiving be short or long, orderly or chaotic, enlightened or mundane. The demand that you have the right answers, have be brilliant, or mold the person to an agenda. Witnessing is clear-seeing. It’s neutral, non-grasping and open-ended.

When you listen as a witness, both parties are held in a greater field of knowing and compassion. As a true listener, the healer already holds what’s shared in the understanding that it’s a holy encounter. As the sense of this deepens with practice, a larger field also appears because it’s already there, and because the healer is awake to it.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him. —Simone Weil

Accessing this greater field aids both parties. Some stories are truly horrific. The compassion and knowing which is present is universal, a real strength beyond the abilities of the human heart and mind. If it’s compassion and wisdom listening through you, then bearing witness is much more comfortable and effective.

Deep listening is miraculous for both listener and speaker. When someone receives us with open-hearted, non-judging, intensely interested listening, our spirits expand. —Sue Patton Thoele

Healing begins in a very real way, right at point of listening and being listened to. The acknowledgment that true listening creates opens the door to trust which opens the door to healing. With trust, what’s been kept dark and hidden feels safe enough to come out. This can be secrets held hidden knowingly, or subconscious and unconscious material surfacing.

Listening is preparation for healing. It sets up the right environment for healing to happen. When a person feels heard by the heart, it gives them courage and confidence. It softens all the hardened places inside and allows flowering of the spirit.

By listening from the heart, the healer too is enhanced. Perception and intuition opens up, insight becomes reliable, and the person of the healer can step out of the way. In essence, there isn’t a healer. Only healing.

Let’s end now with an excellent view of true listening:

An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one’s own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker’s world from the inside, step in inside his or her shoes. This unification of speaker and listener is actually and extension and enlargement of ourselves, and new knowledge is always gained from this. Moreover, since true listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the other. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will fell less and less vulnerable and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. As this happens, speaker and listener begin to appreciate each other more and more, and the duet dance of love is begun again. —M. Scott Peck

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Last night I met again with Reiki practitioners I’ve trained for our monthly dojo gathering. The theme for the evening was: Simplifying Oneness and how it helps in daily living. Oneness is a foundational truth deeply etched in the Reiki teachings, and across all wisdom traditions. In Reiki the practitioner is one with herself, her environment, others (especially when giving Reiki to another), the cosmos at large, Reiki itself and the Divine. The most accessible felt sense of Oneness through the Reiki teachings is compassion in most cases.

Just to give some context, Oneness has been elucidated cross-culturally by many spiritual traditions, and even by thinkers like Einstein. Here are only some examples:

When we look at the world, at the person in front of us, at the tree outside our window, it’s not immediately apparent that we’re “one” at all. The person in front of you is clearly separate to your eyes, encased in her own skin, with a distinct look and personality. It’s the same with the tree; it’s another life form, doesn’t have human features and is unable to speak to you using language. This sense of separation is accentuated when we’re dealing with people or places far removed from our family, neighborhood and close concerns. We express this distance with the word “foreign.” This word is derived from Latin, Old French and Middle English to have the meanings of “on the outside” and “outside.”

Gives pause, doesn’t it? Is it “outside” that the person in front of you or removed by continents experiences hunger and thirst, pain and pleasure, seeks happiness and prosperity, loves their family and is generally in relationship to life in the same ways and manner you are?!

And what of the tree? It definitely needs food and water. It contributes to life like you do; you admire it for it’s beauty and enjoy its shade or fruit. And it’s a member of a family, a species.

The Buddha said: “All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life.” It’s really that simple. This extends to all of life. Just today, the Dalai Lama’s official Facebook page posted this:

Ultimately, humanity is one, and this small planet is our only home. If we are to protect this home of ours, each of us needs to feel a vivid sense of universal altruism. It is only this feeling that can remove the self-centered motives that cause people to deceive and misuse one another. If you have a sincere and open heart, you naturally feel self-worth and confidence, and there is no need to be fearful of others.

Last night, we gathered our own practical wisdom about Oneness, especially how it helps in daily living. Here are the major points that were shared by everyone:

• When we’re truly one with ourselves and nicely integrated, it’s a state of wellbeing and happiness.
• Oneness makes daily life meaningful and richer.
• Oneness prevents us from taking Nature for granted and helps us notice the miracle of a roadside weed.
• Engaging our spiritual practices with a sense of Oneness adds the dimension that we’re practicing for the whole world and not only ourselves.
• Bring that cultivated sense of Oneness to the workplace means better communication, less expectation and confrontation, an attractive harmony around us, and overall positivity.
• Being in Oneness is a flow state where natural order takes place, where we don’t have to be in control, and “magic” happens.
• This “magic” means that there are resolutions and results beyond what the logical mind could conceive, and arrived at with much less striving.

Oneness isn’t a topic that can fit in a single post, and will continue here in greater depth. In the meantime, please share in comments your insights about how you cultivate Oneness and how that has enhanced your life.

Each post for the Reiki Help Blog can take anywhere from 1-5 days to write/research, proofread/edit, and post with an appropriate image and formatting. If you leave this space with any value, knowledge, joy or understanding, please consider making a donation of your choice.

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