Ram Dass Now

I talk about my kids in pretty much every post. It is hard not to. Anyone who is or has been a mom to young children will understand why. This is what I do all hours of the day. Be with my childen. Oh, and nights too. Neither of them sleeps through the night yet. So to say they are on my mind a lot is the understatement of the year.

“ If only I didn’t have these kids around my neck” (page 33)

Oh, how often this thought pulses through my veins. If only…I could go on a meditation retreat and REALLY figure myself out…I could start doing yoga again…I could chant more often…the list goes on.

The thing is, my children are my mediation retreats, they are my yoga teachers, they are my chanting companions. It is just my head that I am stuck in. If I stop and change the way I look at it, I can see that having kids is just what I need. They take every little bit of me that I do not like and bring it out in the open. I don’t need to go sit in a cave to figure out how to be more patient. That lesson lies in my son trying to make our kitchen floor into a swimming pool using a cup and our kitchen sink. Yoga poses are endless when trying to hold my children as I do the dishes or cook dinner. And chanting, well, kids LOVE to sing the SAME songs OVER and OVER again. Is chanting the names of God not the perfect thing to do?

I once asked Ram Dass how to go about handling the sticky times with my children. He told me to just see them as souls. We are all just souls. Do not get caught in the roles. “I am you MOTHER and you LISTEN to your MOTHER!” No, none of that.

“The Spirit is the Spirit” (page 30)

And here we are. Now. Just where we are supposed to be. No, I am not missing out on wonderful retreats by having kids. I am missing out on having kids by thinking I need to be at a meditation retreat.

I am at the market, getting food for dinner. I have my 2 year old in the cart, and I am wearing my 8 week old in a front pack. My 8 week old starts crying…he wants to nurse… but I need to get food!..he gets more upset…my 2 year old keeps telling me Canyon (my baby) is sad…I know!..I try to go faster, and faster…I am getting sweaty, he is NOT happy. As I walk, trying to rock him back and forth while I move forward at the same time, I think about Coby, and the story on page 24.

I stop.

As I look into my baby’s eyes, I see him for the first time since we have been in the store. Not in terms of seeing with my eyes, but seeing with my heart. He starts to calm down as I calm myself down. His look of total innocence takes any cover I had over my heart and rips it right off. I leave the store, not getting half the things I had intended to get. But it does not matter. Staying in there was costing way too much! And not in terms of money.

As Canyon was crying, I kept telling him that it was ok, that I loved him. When I decided to stop and REALLY look at him, when he stopped crying, I said the same exact thing. Why did he not stop crying before? The words were the same. Well, it is simple. He was picking up on my vibrations. He could care less what I said. My stress was directly absorbed into his being, and when I was able to stop and calm my mind, he did so as well.

So often, I feel as though I need to use words to express myself. I was with a friend today, and she was telling me about a tragic incident that had happened to her. I felt such compassion towards her. It seemed like nothing I was saying to her could relate this feeling back to her. It was frustrating. I really wanted her to know how much love and empathy I was feeling. But nothing could…quite…you know how it is. Then I just looked at her in her eyes for a while, and that was it. She finally felt it. Again, it wasn’t in the words, it was in the vibrations.

As a side note, in honor of something I said in my last post (not living my life to be who others want me to be anymore), I decided to stop shaving. I have never liked shaving! Take that society!

It is so wonderful being here now with y’all. I hope you can feel my love, because I am not about to try and explain it.

Thoughts, thoughts, and more thoughts. I live in a sea of thoughts, ebbing and flowing like the tides. Some are profound (so I like to think), some mundane. The thing is, they are all the same, and they all mean nothing.  They mean nothing in the context of this BIG question, a question so simple, yet so intricate, that Ram Dass poses to all of us on page 15…

WHO AM I?

Well, I am not my thoughts. I am not all the labels that I have identified with. In thinking about this, I am reminded of Ram Dass talking about a particular LSD experience he had, in which all of the labels he had assumed made up who he was went flying out the door, and all that remained was this essence that many may call Soul, or Atman.

I am not a mother, or a wife, or a daughter, or a sister. I identify so closely with these roles most of the time that to say I am not them is both scary and freeing. Scary in the sense of “well then what can I hold on to?”, and freeing in the sense that I no longer have to live up to the expectations that I have set up to fill these roles. If this were a play, I would be one hard ass director.

Most of my life, I have been playing the role of being who others want me to be, or at least who I think they want me to be. Thank goodness I can let that one fly out the window because that one really sucks!

So who am I then? Well, I am the seer, the one who sees. When I visualize who I am, I see this mini-me sitting on top of my heart, just watching this whole melodrama of my life unfold in a pretty silly way. From this seat, life is beautiful, and extremely humorous. The task at hand is to be able to maintain this position in the heat of a sticky moment. When life is going smoothly, no problem. But when something happens that gives me that icky feeling inside, I usually find myself so absorbed in the issue that I completely forget I am the seer. I become the issue, which is just, well, yuck! Only when the issue resolves do I remember to take that seat back on top of my heart. When I am in this place, the possibilities are truly endless. From here, I can completely open my heart, and see so much more. I can fell this brilliant energy rushing through my body.

It is still hard to believe that I am not my thoughts. But when I read about it in Be Here Now, and in many other spiritual books, I know it to be true. I need no proof. I can just feel it. Why is that so hard to believe? Life in general is hard to believe. It is crazy that we are even here, on this planet, in the middle of space, spinning around, yet not flying off. Why do we always need proof of all this? Parvati mentions Ram Dass saying to her while in India “we are here to bear witness”. With them as witnesses, I have complete faith that what they say is true, and what so many realized beings have said to be true. They simply can’t all be nuts. And if they are all nuts, well, I will strive every day of my life to become as nuts as they are.

I am lying in bed, unable to turn off the chatter of my monkey mind. All I can think about is how horrible of a mom I was earlier in the day. I look to each side of me, and there lie Clavey and Canyon, my two babies, sleeping so sweetly, with their innocent little faces looking so magical in the moment. How could I have possibly gotten so upset with Clavey today? I fret over all of the mistakes I made, I just feel so down about it. Then, page 14 hits me like a ton of bricks…

YOU ARE A TOTALLY DETERMINED BEING

Remembering these words in that moment created a feeling inside my heart that, like most intense feelings, is very hard to verbalize. All I can say is it felt as if Ram Dass reached into my chest, took hold of my heart, held it very gently and securely in his soft hands, and made it feel completely weightless. It was no longer weighed down by all these feelings of guilt and regret. I was able to see that who I was on that day was exactly who I had to be. “It ‘s got to happen that way” (page12). For some reason beyond my understanding, that was the way the book was written.

The next day I was talking to a friend, explaining how I had to get out of the house because I felt like I was going to die. After I said that, I thought it just sounded like an awful thing to say. I carried on about my day, and for some reason, that statement kept bothering me, as if it was saying “hey, look at me, you could learn something from me!” I just could not figure out why I was not able to let that comment go. I thought of calling my friend and retracting my statement. Maybe that would help. Probably not. Then, I read page 8, and could feel the tears build inside of me…

“In order to get to the destination…YOU MUST DIE”

I love how Sue brought up Bhagavan Dass, and how he describes this despair as ” being brought to the altar of the sincere tear.”  I was right at the altar, and instead of propelling myself past that edge, as the moth propels itself into the flame, I retreated. What did I have to lose? What was I afraid to lose? It isn’t as if I could have made the situation any worse. If only I could allow my SELF to die, then….ahhhh. I went from hoping to never have that feeling again, to looking forward to the next time I felt as if I may die, from fear to “bring it on!”

I began contemplating more ways that I described this feeling of dying. Often times, I find myself thinking, after getting my buttons pushed one too many times “I am going to explode”. Well, good. That is just what I need to propel me over that edge, “beyond the beyond”. I NEED to explode. Only this time, I am not going to explode to my children, or whatever it is that seems to be pushing me closer and closer to the altar. I am going to explode my whole being towards God. I am going to grab my children by the hand and say hold on, you might want to stop crying for this one. We are about to stare God directly in the face and say “woa, this is one far out trip”.

It is so great to share this trip with all of you wonderful souls.

Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha

I am sitting on the couch with my 4-week-old baby, Canyon, asleep in my arms. As I close my eyes in this moment, I can just feel the Love of God, the Love of the Universe, pouring through me. “I am the bliss of the Universe, Everything am I”. I am here, now, and isn’t life just beautiful…

My 2 year old, Clavey, wakes up, crying for mommy. All of a sudden it feels like I had been floating on a cloud of bliss in the sky and then catapulted at an amazing speed back into “reality”.

I go in to get my son out of bed, and he is not in a state of harmony. I try to help him regroup, but he pushes me away. He is 2. He can do everything by himself. How did I forget this? Meanwhile, my 4 week old is crying to nurse. I try to nurse him, but my 2 year old throws a fit because he wants me to play with HIM. I feel lost. Where did God go? Why am I not floating in the clouds anymore? All I can think about is how to make it through the rest of the day, and then I remember page one…

SURRENDER

I realize that is why I feel no God-presence in moments like these. Instead of opening up, letting the energy come in, I go in lock-down mode. But once I throw up my arms and rip open my heart, ahhhh. The fussing continues, but ahhhh. I can handle this now.  I ask Clavey if he wants to have “mommy milk” with Canyon. Problem solved. Once again I find myself on the couch, one child in each arm, nursing both of them back into harmony…and finding my own harmony at the same time.

This is how it is with my children. One moment is up, then the next down. I know that it is not this way simply to test my patience. It is this way because they live so intensely in the moment. For them, this moment is all there is. As I see both of them so absorbed in the Now, I can’t help but go back to page one…

“Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven”

It comes so naturally for them. Me, I have to really work on it. But as I sit with them, becoming as they are, seeing the Universe through their eyes, my whole being feels full of light. My heart is open, and God comes in. Residing in my heart cave, my hridayam, the next tantrum doesn’t make me want to run. Instead of the feeling of frustration running through my veins, I am able to look at Clavey and Canyon with…

UNBEARABLE COMPASSION

…and say “this is hard sometimes, isn’t it?” This whole life thing is tricky at times. But the great thing is, we are all here together, just figuring it out.  Sometimes, this whole surrendering business is easy. Other times, my ego takes over and the idea of surrender is off in some far away land. But the more I work on it, the more natural in becomes. And with these two beautiful boys, I get PLENTY of time to work on it. My children. My little guru’s.

Life is a series of moments. Some of these moments are to be used in this lifetime, and others perhaps to be saved in our deepest memories and used in another incarnation.

The moment I opened Be Here Now is one of those moments that has changed this life I am living in a way that I will never forget. Ram Dass has helped me to remember what I had forgotten sometime between birth and adulthood. It was not as if he was there teaching me new concepts. Each page I read felt as though I was reading something that I already knew, but was not able to remember until that very moment. I was able to see that the path to God was not through my mind, which is where I had been looking from my whole life. Ram Dass has showed me how to look at the universe from the stillness within my heart. Living life in this way has helped me in every aspect of my life. Now, as a mother to two young boys under the age if 2, living life from my heart, not identifying with my ego, has been invaluable. In turn, I am trying to help my kids not to forget what they already know deep within their hearts. How we forget to “be here now” as we grow older is something I still do not know the answer to. Yet it shows in watching my children each and every day that they have not forgotten this.

“Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven”. Ram Dass was the first to help me remember this, and now my children are helping me to not forget this each day.

I have found that each moment holds an opportunity for awakening. While I used to try and run away from the darker moments in life, I have learned that often times, those dark, sticky moments are opportunities for some of the largest spiritual transformations. Ram Dass has reminded me to stay with those moments, stare at them head on, and meet them with grace. Instead of turn my back on the difficult times, I have finally remembered to simply say to myself “and this too”.

It is all part of the trip, and what a fascinating trip it has been so far. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to participate in this blog, and look forward to the insights and transformations that will come about in the process.

Namaste,

Melissa Duncan