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.

Pg 17. So many layers of reality/consciousness that we cannot possibly know with our minds, but we intuit it, we “infer the presence of something else” (pg 18).  All the levels, known, unknown, unknowable, are all out there, all in here. Except trying to grasp at them doesn’t seem to work. As a matter of fact, I have learned that the more I try to read and reason the existence of spirit, the less likely I am to believe it! Why? Because I’m trying to apply dynamics/rules from one level of consciousness to a completely different one (among other reasons in all levels–more on that later). There are just so many ways to experience being-ness–even just at this level of waking consciousness! Not to mention the other layers William James writes about. We get to just be HERE now! But we know those other places are there too, but for this, we stay here.

We all are tuned in to some of these other ‘realities’ around us. It’s different for each of us.  We may experience them as intuition (intangible knowledge), or as natural talent (often behaviorally expressed). We just know there are pockets of ‘understanding’ that we cannot quite explain. So we don’t have to (explain, that is). And we may even recognize some healthy things to do that encourage these periods of ‘getting it’: Yoga, Taiji, meditation, music, prayer, exercise, Qigong, Pilates, reading good books . . . the more you do them, the more you seem to have the ‘times of understanding’ last longer. You’re actually just paying better attention.

Sometimes though, we get back here to the more simple things, like just letting the sight of a child help you experience God in your soul,  your gut, in your bones (Pg 16, “it’s got intuitive validity”), with no intellectual explanation needed. You know the feeling I’m talking about. . . when you’re busy being all grumpy, and you inexplicably allow yourself to melt into mirth at the site of child barking, pretending to be a puppy; no longer worrying about that project you’ve got to turn in, no longer ‘worried’ about ‘losing your center.’ Besides, what’s so special about the center anyway? At this point, I’m not so certain there is a center, except when we draw boundaries (and most of us do), then ‘center’ is a useful practice. Do you draw boundaries around surrender? (Pg 20)

Please remember that page numbers refer to the Brown Pages, From Bindu to Ojas, in Be Here Now. Be Love Now soon to come!

Namaste’
Jon

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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.

So it’s all the same thing. It’s all made of the same energy. God is everything. . . including me, and you, and that table. I like the comment that we are all fingers on God’s hand.  I like it because it really seems to fit—we may be God’s pinky, but until the pinky ‘remembers’ that it’s a pinky, it’s just a pinky dressed in the projections of an ego; but when it remembers that it’s God, that pinky becomes God—it strips itself of the ego; rather, the ego is, well, absorbed into God, into everything-ness. Is-ness.

Unbearable compassion. Hridayam, heart cave. Sameness. For a long time, I tried to meditate and ‘pretend’ that I was directly connected to the things around me; this used my brain and did a wonderful job of entertaining my ego.  Then came Be Here Now and that heart cave. The whole idea of going into your heart to really experience same-ness shook me up a bit—I had been so proud of my intellectual understanding that I had forgotten that experiential knowing comes from the heart. . . and REALLY knowing that you are the same as everything MUST involve total, unbearable compassion because it not only involves direct knowing of beauty in ways that go way out there, but also the same one-ness with deep pain, sorrow, confusion; what a beautiful arrangement, that even knowing pain is a direct expression of the highest form of Love: Compassion. Compassion is beauty; it is one of the greatest transformations to witness.

So, while meditation has changed in its form, I am grateful for having gone through the more ego-based ‘thinking’ that was masquerading as meditation . . . for that was a part of my path; without it, I would not have realized the difference, or that it’s all part of the same thing. It’s still all the same thing, even if we ‘get it wrong,’ we still get it right. Compassion for yourself folks. If you are starting a path of meditation, and things seem to get noisy at first, it’s ok; have compassion for yourself because you’re just going through exactly what you’re supposed to go through.

I’ll wrap up my first post by sharing that I’ve been at the beach for the past several days, with beautiful people. I’ve learned so much from the beach, from watching children catch minnows, then set them free because they are God’s children, too. Children get total, unbearable compassion.

Namaste’
Jonathan F. Anderson

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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