Passion and Compassion

This blog is a continual story that begins with the first posting in the Blog Archive, The Journey Begins. Click down the list to read entries, and click on arrows to reveal monthly drop-down menus.

When Howard Bad Hand told me that my cancer was connected to deep rage, I intuitively knew he was right. Rage is a passionate emotion, and Howard had said that Hexagram 43 was about the polarity of passion versus reason, so I decided to do a little research into the meaning of passion. According to Webster's, passion is "intense, driving, or overpowering feeling or emotion, especially any violent or intense emotion that prevents reflection." So passion can block reason, and when the intensity of passion overpowers reason, we all know that can be dangerous. Here's more on passion - "the state of mind when it is powerfully acted upon by something external that causes an extreme or inordinate desire, as the passions of love, hate, jealousy, wrath, ambition, avarice, fear, a passion for war, or for drink." Extreme passion is like an out of control fire.

On the other hand, who wants to live a passionless, dry, dull life? I began to wonder if the balance point between the heat of passion and the coolness of reason lies in the cultivation of compassion. In my session with Scott, my rage transformed into compassion. Passion feels red, and compassion feels pink. So does that mean if we add a cup of white light to passion that we get compassion? And what does that little prefix com- mean, anyway? Turns out, the prefix com- means "together." So, compassion is the ability to experience our own intense, alive feelings as well as everyone else's. In red energy, we're stuck in our own "I, me, mine" world, and in pink energy, we feel everyone's desires, needs and drives, our own included. The experience of other beings' needs and passions moves us into a unified field of awareness. We feel intuitively connected to others, so we resource the cool-minded influence of reason to check our destructive impulses before we harm others. When we're guided by compassion, our heart opens like a flower in full bloom, we radiate loving warmth, and we live for "we" instead of "me."

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Transforming Rage

This blog is a continual story that begins with the first posting in the Blog Archive, The Journey Begins. Click down the list to read entries, and click on arrows to reveal monthly drop-down menus.

To work on my assignment from Howard Bad Hand, I scheduled an appointment with Scott Macinnis, a shamanistic/mystical therapist who specializes in taking clients into deeper connection with Source. Here is a quote from Scott's website (energeticmassageboulder.com):

Nothing is outside of God. You are an immaculate, immortal being who has voluntarily embraced ignorance and vulnerability for the sheer joy of remembering. You will learn that the very issues that trip you up the most are your greatest allies.

Scott Macinnis

I love working with Scott. He is a caring, fearless practitioner who is very dedicated to serving the higher good. When he asked what was up for me, I told him that I wanted to work on my rage. The best way to deal with intense emotion is to feel it and let it pass through and transform, so we started my session by diving right into that red energy. Scott suggested that I visualize some people who I feel rage towards, and allow my feelings about them to rise up. As soon as I imagined some political figures who really push my buttons, things quickly accelerated; I felt myself turn into an uncontrollable grizzly bear, and the rage took over. As the wild, angry bear, my hands actually shook as I tore these people's hearts out, bit their heads off, and ate every last piece of them. It was incredibly liberating to just let myself go into the rage completely, without holding anything back. When the carnage was all over, my victims and I stood and stared at each other in our soul bodies. Amazingly, I felt compassion for them. Then each of their guides came to take them off to spiritual school, and a strange guide who I had never seen before came for me.

He was a tall, blue entity who stood in front of me with a disapproving stare. I immediately felt that Blue Man was impatient with me and annoyed at having to work with such an immature soul. Although I felt embarrassed about my level of emotional chaos, I also realized that he had similar lessons to learn. Even though Blue Man was much more in control of his emotions than I am, he was judgmental, and I had the feeling that his guides directed him to work with me in order to deepen his practice of compassion. It was interesting. We were both to learn more about compassion by working with each other.

Slowly, Blue Man began turning pink, and as he turned pink, he began to radiate compassion from his heart area. I got the impression that he tends to hang out more in the mental zones than the emotional, and that turning pink was a good exercise for him to do. As he radiated more and more compassion, it flowed into me, and we started resonating at a Unity level together. I felt love and forgiveness for myself and for all the beings I had judged and ripped apart as the grizzly bear. Then Pink Man turned into Blue Man again and disappeared. He was still pretty impatient, and glad to be finished with me.

I was feeling very open-hearted, and didn't mind at all that he left. At that point, my attention was drawn to my tumor, which had started burning when I was doing the grizzly bear thing. Scott guided me to explore my tumor, and since the growth is right over my heart, I turned my attention towards it with wide open compassion. I put my hand over my breast, loving and accepting its wound with tears in my eyes. Then Green Tara, the Tibetan Buddhist deity, appeared in the forefront of my mind.

For many years now, I have had various experiences in the archetypal realms which have included contact with many different types of entities, including Buddhist, Hindu and Egyptian deities. I regard these archetypes as energetic patterns generated by Spirit in other vibratory realms. Carl Jung felt that archetypes exist in an area of the collective unconscious that is closer than we are to the Self, or Source. I have no idea on what level of reality they exist, that is, if they are actually "real." But what I do know is that they come to me, and they exist in my reality. I have a particularly special relationship with Green Tara. She is a manifestation of wisdom and compassion, and in my experience, she also brings peace and a vibrant connection with the renewal of life that emanates from the sparkling, positive life force of the physical plane.

Green Tara

Tara took me on a journey back to the Big Bang, through cycles of birth, manifestation and death over and over again. She showed me that the problem comes when we get hung up on one of the stages, like grabbing onto suffering and getting stuck there. That sort of unconscious complex stops us from evolving. We need to keep flowing with the changes, just like the I Ching, the Book of Changes, teaches. The trick is to flow with the go and go with the flow, and not dig in our heels anywhere. There's no getting off the bus.

Then Tara reached into my heart and pulled out a bunch of stones, squishing each one between her fingers. The stones were grudges that I've held for a long time - probably lifetime after lifetime. I saw and felt little holes where the rocks had been, and they slowly filled up with soft, pink flesh, very healthy and vibrant. And the surrounding tissue filled out, softened, and plumped up. When I checked in with my tumor, it felt soothed, and was no longer burning. Tara's last gesture was to grant me a boon, a seed that she planted in my heart to sprout new life and promote healthy tissue.

It's amazing how much transformation can take place in just one session. This inner work released a great deal of my attachment to rage, and I am very thankful to Scott and Howard Bad Hand for being willing to be guides on my psychospiritual healing journey.

I would love to hear from you. To leave a comment about this posting, scroll down and type inside the white box below the heading, POST A COMMENT. Underneath the white box, it says Comment as: with a white bar that says Ria Moran (Google). Click the arrows on the right and a dropdown menu will appear. Choose name/URL and type in your name. The URL is not necessary. Or, if you wish, you may choose to leave a comment anonymously. Then click Post Comment in the next white box and your comment will be published. Thank you!

Medicine Man

This blog is a continual story that begins with the first posting in the Blog Archive, The Journey Begins. Click down the list to read entries, and click on arrows to reveal monthly drop-down menus.

A good friend of mine has been studying with a Native American medicine man named Howard Bad Hand for several years. Howard lives in Taos, New Mexico, and he comes to Boulder periodically to teach and give I Ching readings. When my friend explained how Howard came to be a Taoist medicine man, I was fascinated by his unusual story. As a young man, Howard was an alcoholic until the day he wandered into a bookstore and picked up a copy of the I Ching. After paging through it, he was struck by a thunderbolt of recognition from his soul. He put down the bottle, picked up the Book of Changes, and found his life path. Howard chants at Sun Dances, offers sweats and healing ceremonies, and his counseling sessions combine Taoist wisdom with keen insight and clairvoyance.

Howard Bad Hand is as intense as his name suggests, and when I decided to have a reading with him, I was a little nervous. My friend told me that Howard doesn't pull any punches; he says what he sees, and if you're not ready to hear it, well, too bad for you. When I arrived at my friend's house for my reading, I was a few minutes early and I sat in the kitchen with a cup of green tea while Howard finished eating his dinner. As the dishes were cleared away, I was invited into the dining room, and met Howard's steady, piercing gaze. He had long, silver hair, a craggy, handsome face and a no nonsense air about him. After a brief introduction, we got down to business. I expected to throw the customary I Ching coins, but Howard bypasses that step and simply asks his client to choose a series of numbers, and then he calculates which hexagram the numbers correspond to.

Hexagram 43

Breakthrough

I chose Hexagram 43, Breakthrough. The I Ching has always struck me as a an obscure oracle, and I have never really been drawn to it. But my gut tells me that it's a very powerful system, and that whenever it crosses my path, I should pay attention to what it is telling me. When Howard said that Hexagram 43 means Breakthrough, I thought that like sounded pretty good news. But as he began to explain its meaning, I sobered up and listened carefully. The image of Hexagram 43, which is also called Kuai, is a lake that is rising up to heaven. But when a lake rises to heaven, it can cause a violent cloudburst. Metaphorically, the waters of the rising lake represent rising passions, and when they reach heaven, they can be released in a storm of passionate emotion.

Impassioned Storm: Tornado and Lightning

The deep meaning that is hidden within Hexagram 43 is the battle of passion versus reason, or evil versus good. The mistake is to jump into the fray of good against evil, releasing passions that can cause violent, destructive storms. Howard told me that my passions are too intense and they transform into anger and rage too easily. He recognized that my rage is aimed towards injustice in the world, towards the powerless people being controlled and destroyed by the powerful. He said that I take on the suffering of the world, but that is a destructive practice that does not benefit anyone, least of all me. My problem is that I have not been accepting life on its own terms. In his stoic, patient manner, he said that good and evil will always exist and that I can't do anything about that.

I was aware of this problem that I have, and I was amazed that he zeroed in one of my unconscious complexes that was causing me a lot of trouble, and that may even be one of the deep causes of my cancer. When I asked him how to work with this issue, he said that I must change my attitudes. He said that whenever I feel rage towards greedy power abusers, I cause more harm than good because I shift into a violent vibratory level, and I actually become evil. This hexagram is very specific in its direction to step away from the battle of good against evil, and to keep emotionally disengaged. I found this great quote about Hexagram 43 at the following web address: http://deoxy.org/iching/43.

If we do evil the favor of fighting against it blow for blow, we lose in the end because thus we ourselves get entangled in hatred and passion. Therefore it is important to begin at home, to be on guard in our own persons against the faults we have branded. In this way, finding no opponent, the sharp edges of the weapons of evil become dulled. For the same reasons we should not combat our own faults directly. As long as we wrestle with them, they continue victorious. Finally, the best way to fight evil is to make energetic progress in the good.

Howard emphasized that I need to create peace and equanimity within myself in order to heal. He said I add much unnecessary stress to my life with my attitudes and mindsets, and that these forces were actually strong enough to kill me. His piercing gaze felt hypnotic as he quietly stated that I can cure myself completely from cancer with mind medicine. He looked clairvoyantly into the tumor over my heart and said he would be willing to perform some healing ceremonies for me in Taos, but that neither he nor anyone else can help me if I don't heal my attitudes.

His last piece of advice, which was very difficult to hear, was that Indian medicine men do not believe in chemotherapy, and he gravely recommended against it. I had a feeling he would say this because of my experience with my Native American spirit guide, Mother, who came to me at my doctor's office weeks before. She had told me how she felt about the ways Western medicine fights cancer. Very simply, she said, "It's' not our way." And that's exactly what Howard said. "It's not our way." But I had already had my port surgically inserted into my chest, which is a device that gives the nurses easy access to a large vein in my chest for the application of chemotherapy IV's, and I had been emotionally preparing to accept the chemotherapy as a modality of healing that I greatly needed. This was a very difficult aspect of my reading with Howard Bad Hand, because I sensed so much truth in everything he was saying, but in the end, we have to pick and choose from the sea of advice that floods into the lives of cancer sufferers, and there are many tough decisions to make. So, I chose to go through with my chemotherapy, but also to focus unflinchingly on my mental attitudes that produce rage and act against compassion.

I would love to hear from you. To leave a comment about this posting, scroll down and type inside the white box below the heading, POST A COMMENT. Underneath the white box, it says Comment as: with a white bar that says Ria Moran (Google). Click the arrows on the right and a dropdown menu will appear. Choose name/URL and type in your name. The URL is not necessary. Or, if you wish, you may choose to leave a comment anonymously. Then click Post Comment in the next white box and your comment will be published. Thank you!

A Teaching

This blog is a continual story that begins with the first posting in the Blog Archive, The Journey Begins. Click down the list to read entries, and click on arrows to reveal monthly drop-down menus.

(As you might have guessed due to the gaps in the timeline of my postings, I have had to take some downtime during my months of chemo in which I felt like a zombie and my brain was too blank to focus on writing. So, I'm squeezing in my writing during periods of relative strength and lucidity, and I am referring to my diary in order to keep the postings in a continuous flow.)

I'd like to tell you about the work I've been doing in my therapy sessions. The inner work I do is not typical psychotherapy; my sessions are more like psychospiritual journeys. If you have been interested enough to follow my blog up until now, you probably resonate with the same things that I do. All the same, I do expect to lose readers along the way because this kind of shamanistic/mystical therapy challenges the dominant belief systems and can be very confronting. If your ways do not resonate with mine, I understand, and wish you well. I believe that there are many paths, but that they all lead to the same Source and we shall all come together in the end.

I had a session with Devi Records on January 23, 2009, two weeks after my diagnosis. She is a therapist who utilizes Hakomi and EMDR to contact and heal unconscious complexes, and she is very comfortable working within shamanistic and mystical levels of awareness. We work very compatibly, easing in and out of varying trance states. In body-centered psychotherapy, sessions usually begin with a check-in, when the client closes her eyes and feels into any physical sensations that are calling out for attention. On this day, I felt burning and stabbing pains in my wounded left breast, and in my heart, I felt a prickly ball of red energy that felt like anger.

As I explored the anger, it deepened into rage, and I was suddenly launched into a compelling journey. I consider experiences like the one I am about to describe as past life memories. But I hold that term loosely; they could also be visions from my soul to help me connect with certain patterns of consciousness that will have a healing effect on me.

In my first vision, I am a muscular man with blonde hair, engaged in hand-t0-hand combat in a very bloody battle. Adrenaline is rushing through my body, and I'm in a state of pure blood lust. I want to kill as many of these invaders of my homeland as I can, and I have no thought of my own safety. I realize that I will die, but I feel no fear. My self-preservation instinct is overpowered by my rage. When I finally do die, my anger carries over into my disembodied state, and I feel great regret that I can no longer kill more of my enemies.

At this point in the session, Devi calls in my guides and the guides of my disembodied past self. She helps me to break off my connection to my past self by watching him walk off into the spirit realms with his guides, who are different from mine, and by reassuring me that his guides will take him where he needs to go in order to heal from his ordeal. Then my guides surround me with healing love, and help me to clear my residual feelings caused by remembering this traumatic death.

Immediately after feeling a sense of completion with my warrior lifetime, I am drawn into another vision in which I am a woman on the prairies in the American West. My hands are being roughly pulled and bound behind my back, and my husband and son are also held captive about forty feet away from me, in front of our farmhouse. We are being attacked by Native Americans on the warpath.

Suddenly, my consciousness separates from my former self and I am more off to the side watching the event than I was in my previous vision as the enraged warrior. I observe as my husband and son are forced to watch my rape, and then one of my attackers rips open my dress and slices off my breasts. Although I feel horrified, I am protected from feeling any physical pain as I witness the events, and then I am suddenly flooded with understanding and compassion for my attackers. Just as I was protecting my homeland and way of life as the warrior fighting off invaders in my previous vision, these Indians were protecting their homeland and way of life by fighting off their invaders, who just happened to be me and my family. And by raping me and cutting off my breasts in particular, they were sending a symbolic message that this white woman will not be bearing any more children to populate land that does not belong to her.

These two lifetimes are like opposing bookends that offer me a great teaching. Good and evil are relative. How can I hold a grudge against my Indian attackers when I can remember feeling the same bloodlust and hatred as an enraged European warrior? By experiencing both sides of the attacker/victim polarity, the charge neutralizes, and by understanding the pain of my enemy, my own pain dissolves.

This planet is a place of great beauty but it also contains great violence, and in order to make peace with our time here, we must accept all of the qualities of life on earth. I admit that I have difficulty accepting violence. I sometimes become enraged by the tremendous amount of violence that takes place on our planet, especially by instances when the strong attack the weak. This deeply held rage has tangled roots that have burrowed into the unconscious complexes of my inner shadow, and I believe that it contributes to the patterns that have caused my cancer. I truly feel that the invasive tentacles of my cancer that lie right over my heart are related to my toxic rage that has led to the thwarting of my own life force. My great teaching from this shamanic session has to do with letting go. The dramas taking place within us and all around us are not simplistic battles between good and evil. The forces that weave our karmic interactions are very complex, and we must do our best to remain calm in the center of this grand opera.

At the end of the session, I checked in to the energy over my heart, and it had cooled down considerably. Instead of a fiery red ball, it felt like a warm sun, radiant with understanding and compassion.

Of course, there is always more work to do in the inner realms. Since this session with Devi, I have spent time in meditation clearing the samskaras that were created during my rape and mutilation that lifetime. Samskara is a Sanskrit word for the imprint or impression of an experience that remains with a soul throughout a lifetime or over the course of many lifetimes. A samskara functions like a seed for future actions or results. One of the seed patterns for my breast cancer is probably related to the mutilation of my breast in that lifetime, and by releasing my anger and hatred towards the man who mutilated me, I am helping to cleanse myself of one of the causes of my cancer on the subtle energy planes.

I would love to hear from you. To leave a comment about this posting, scroll down and type inside the white box below the heading, POST A COMMENT. Underneath the white box, it says Comment as: with a white bar that says Ria Moran (Google). Click the arrows on the right and a dropdown menu will appear. Choose name/URL and type in your name. The URL is not necessary. Or, if you wish, you may choose to leave a comment anonymously. Then click Post Comment in the next white box and your comment will be published. Thank you!

The Tao

This blog is a continual story that begins with the first posting in the Blog Archive, The Journey Begins. Click down the list to read entries, and click on arrows to reveal monthly drop-down menus.

I feel very blessed by the many people who have stepped forward to help me navigate through the dark night of my cancer journey. As my partner Ken, my sister Jacqui, and my dear friend Pat were negotiating practical realities for me, I was working with a few therapists and a Native American shaman to help me clear a path through the Underworld. With the loving support of these gifted people, I began to steadily chip away at my unconscious complexes that hold unresolved fear, anger and other destructive emotions soon after the day of my diagnosis.

An unconscious complex is a pattern we hold deep inside that effects how we think and feel and act. And not only do we have no idea that our unconscious complex holds this kind of power over us, usually, we don't even know that it exists. But when we run into an inescapable, relentless obstacle in life, it is a sign that our soul is making a move to transform our unconscious complex, and that a great struggle is taking place deep within. As our soul efforts to push our hidden complexes into the light of awareness, we are thrust into great drama and turmoil in our life. Suddenly, the energy that is trying to move up and out from our depths can take on volcanic force. We might be diagnosed with cancer. Our husband might suddenly declare he wants a divorce. We might be losing our child to drugs. The bank might be repossessing home. These events that seem to be happening from the outside in are actually happening in perfect synchronicity with the movement of our soul. They are taking place within the Flow of All That Is, the Great Eternal Tao.

Lao Tzu, Translated by Victor H. Mair

15

(52)

____

Everything under heaven has a beginning

which may be thought of as the mother

of all under heaven.

Having realized the mother,

you thereby know her children.

Knowing her children,

go back to abide with the mother.

To the end of your life,

you will not be imperiled.

When our hearts ache, our bellies churn, and our raw, broken voices sob, "How do I make the cancer go away?" "How do I get my husband back?" "How do I rescue my child?" "How do I save my home?" we desperately turn to Spirit for an answer. When threatened with profound loss, our longing for restoration makes us desperate to wrestle answers from divine powers that seem uncaring at best and unthinkably cruel at worst.

Let's go back to the riddle: Everything under heaven has a beginning which may be thought of as the mother of all under heaven. Our keyword is "beginning." The mother of all under heaven is the Source, the energy of the Big Bang, the fountain of Spirit that created all that is. The Mother Moment is the instant of pure potential that is about to burst forth into form. Next line: Having realized the mother, you therefore know her children. Having understood that Mother Moment is the birth of pure potential into infinite varieties of form, we know her children, which is All The Cool Stuff That Got Born, including you and me. Next line: Knowing her children, go back to abide with the mother. Now that we have experienced All The Cool Stuff That Got Born, it's time to remember the quiet, unborn Mother Moment, the true Source of our awareness. To the end of your life, you will not be imperiled. Once we break out of the trance that enthralls us in the multiplicity of phenomena, we will be one with Source in each present moment, and we will be safe from delusion.

This painting from the fifteenth century by Hieronymus Bosch is a surrealist vision of humanity caught in All The Cool Stuff That Got Born in the Mother Moment. Accessing his vivid imagination, Bosch painted the diversity of human experience that runs from the luxuriant highs of pleasure to the anguished mires of torture. To use Lao Tzu's metaphor, the people in this painting are abiding with the children and ignoring the mother. You might say that they have some inner work to do. It takes some will power to free ourselves from the hypnotic reveries of creation and enter the peace of Mother Moment, but it's doable.

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch

When I do work with my therapists, my intention is to dissolve the unconscious complexes that keep me hypnotized in Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. And each time I dissolve one of these complexes, I feel a release of pent-up life force that is urgently needed for my healing on all levels - physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. In my psychospiritual work, I find that my soul naturally guides me into the peaceful, healing space of Mother Moment, a space in which cancer cells are not energetically fed, in which loving acceptance is generated, and in which my mind finds nonjudgmental, soothing rest.

I would love to hear from you. To leave a comment about this posting, scroll down and type inside the white box below the heading, POST A COMMENT. Underneath the white box, it says Comment as: with a white bar that says Ria Moran (Google). Click the arrows on the right and a dropdown menu will appear. Choose name/URL and type in your name. The URL is not necessary. Or, if you wish, you may choose to leave a comment anonymously. Then click Post Comment in the next white box and your comment will be published. Thank you!