Movie Link to Tibetan Book of the Dead

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3219838328703873592

Death and Chocolate

I lift mine eyes unto the hills whence my sustenance comes

Darkness veils the coming dawn then breaks and yields the sun

At dusk I hear the sweetest sound, lo does the Earth Mother sing,

“Come here, my child, come near, my child. Sleep safely under my wing.”

I’ve been working most of the day on a memorial service for my Aunt Mickey. 

Judging from the number of sugar free chocolate candy wrappers in the trash can next to my computer, this endeavor has been harder than I thought it would be.

She died January 11 after a long, slow decline. She’d been bed-ridden for most of 2011 and living in a home where she received loving and tender care. While she never wore make-up that I can remember, whenever we'd go to see her in the home, Auntie had painted-on eyebrows, rosy cheeks and lip gloss. I kind of liked it - that someone (Mylene or one of the other nurses) was tending to her in this way.

Uncle Larry seems to be OK. He continues to play trombone in a seniors band and to go folk dancing most Friday nights. Actually, he seems relieved.

I’ve read that for men who lose a wife it is easier if it is sudden, rather than for her to have a lingering, slow decline into death. For women, it seems much harder on the system to have a sudden loss of a husband than to have plenty of time to acclimate and say goodbye. Even in matters of death, Mars and Venus process things differently.

***************************************************************************

Monday.

New Moon.

This is a good time to begin a project you want to see come to fruition. A few days before the new moon is when traditional farmers prefer to plant new crops - because the fattening of the moon invites the plant devas to rise with it and dance the plants into hardy, thriving fullness.

It’s a good time for a hair cut, because the waxing moon coaxes it to grow out nice and healthy again.

Auntie’s Memorial Service will be on February 4 - a few days before the full moon, which is a good time to release what no longer serves. Perhaps the choreography is perfectly timed. Auntie will be memorialized and we’ll set her soul free into the soon-to-be-waning moon.

My friend Barry sent me a link to a beautiful film about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The movie, narrated by Leonard Cohen, shows rituals performed to help the deceased find enlightenment or, at least, more peace before taking on a new incarnation. 

Tibetan buddhists believe that we are sound sensitive while we are dying (and even for some time after the spirit departs from the flesh), and that reading from the book can help guide the deceased through several treacherous bardos to rest eventually in the vast luminosity of his own essential nature - the clear white light of pure consciousness. 

These ideas spark comfort in me. I hope someone guides me when I’m ready to drop this robe of life. I want some lamas in their pajamas to guide this mama around bardo trauma to the pure white light without much drama. OK? And so it is.

Meanwhile, while I'm alive and kicking, I want plenty of chocolate to sweeten up the bitter aftertaste of loss.

Now, I'm going to cut my hair and plant some seeds in the garden.

ciao for now

Birth: Radical Transformation

CAUTION:  With this blog entry, I become an equal opportunity offender. If you have ever been born or have ever given birth, you may be offended by this article.

Emergence is about how each of us got here. 

The word, “Emergency” is born of what happens at birth. There’s no holding back an emerging baby; it’s the most immediate NOW we know!

TADA! Ready or not, world... Here I AM!!

Turns out how we get here is really important.

Were we conceived consciously or in a drunken stupor? Were we “planned” or “Plan B.” Was there tenderness or violence or both in the act that brought us here? Were we conceived in woman or invitro? (In glass; as in petri dish.)

Did we grow in an emotionally stable and healthy space with great “womb service?” Did we squeeze the umbilicus trying to stop the flow of toxic substances like smoke, alcohol, drugs or environmental poisons? (There are ultra sound pictures of babies doing that!)

Did we get to release the hormone that says “Now, I’m ready,” or was labor induced or spontaneously premature?

Were we given a warm welcome or born into a frigid, bitter battle zone? Born under the influence of drugs or without drugs? Was mom ecstatic or terrified? Was dad there; if not, where? Who ARE these people and where are my real parents?

Some ways of being conceived come with a seed kernel for an avalanche of feelings (and mysterious physiological cell memories) we’ll later have to dig through in order to extricate our tender self and thus, get on with the business of living our dream; our purpose in taking on a body. So much time is wasted. 

Studies have been conducted correlating violence perpetrated against babies at birth, even by well-meaning medical personnel, with violence and dysfunction later in life. The same correlations are noted for drugs administered in labor with drug use later in life. 

At two years of age my friend Kitty and I swallowed morphine and had to have our stomachs pumped because we were turning blue as the morphine arrested our breathing. Kitty’s grandmother was caring for a patient and had the pills in her bag. We got into the bag and ate the medicine like candy. 

What a coincidence! My mother was given morphine and ether during her labor with me. At age five, I knocked my front teeth hard enough to require their extraction under anesthetic with (guess what) ether. I won't even list the number of recreational drugs I dabbled with as a young adult in an effort to understand the original numbness I experienced just when my legs were getting  ready to help mom push me out. We were both drugged and met somewhere up on the ceiling (ether does that to moms and babes) where we watched Dr. King as he tried to revive both of us.

Recapitulations like these are common. As we try to heal from any particular insult to our mortal flesh, our intelligence attracts scenarios that will (perhaps) help us resolve the initial hurt. More often than not, what happens is that we simply accumulate another bit of snow around our particular avalanche’s seed kernel. 

Not ONE of us had an ideal birth because there is no such thing. Anyone who claims to be able to provide us with a pain-free, fear-free, tear-free birth is a charlatan of the worst ilk. Steer clear of those who believe they have a monopoly on "The Right Way to Give Birth.”

Much as we’d like to pretend otherwise, birth is arduous for emerging babies under the best of circumstances. 

The longest journey we’ll ever take is only about four inches long. The duration feels interminable because of compression. Not only are there physical forces which bear down on the child emerging into the world, but each parent is accompanied by her/his ancestral lineage, so there are at least fourteen people in the birthing room in addition to the emerging one(s) - not counting friends, doulas, midwives, nurses or doctors. There’s a lot of pressure brought to bear from the masses of folk present!

We have ancestral lines reaching back to time immemorial. If you count ONLY the birthing mom and dad, their parents and grand parents, that makes fourteen folk! Some of those people did good and honorable things; some did things that were far from heroic. As far back as we can retrieve family stories, we’ll find current events mirroring those of antiquity - particularly the stories that have been concealed and not healed. It is common to have repeat dates of tragedies in a family history. What a coincidence! History repeats itself until the historical event is healed retroactively. We CAN heal forward and backward in time. We don’t have to pass on what was handed to us. We can pay the healing forward.

No one comes through life unscathed. Why bother to put into words ideas that may make today’s mamas and papas feel guilty for the kind of birth they handed to their offspring? Why not accept the status quo and fiddle while Rome burns? Why not enjoy the time we have left before our welcome on earth wears out and we’re evicted from Eden? Why would I try to convince you if I didn’t believe it were so - that one way we can clean up the mess we’ve made of the world is simply by becoming conscious of how we welcome babies into it? 

I believe we can wake up from the delusion under which we are living - namely that our birthing practices in the United States do not cause grave harm to the planet. I believe we can turn the tide and re-empower women to give birth rather than coercing them to succumb to rigid protocols that may interrupt the birth dance and set in motion a cascade of interventions which, though well-meaning, do harm to moms and babes. Broken bonding is reparable, but not so easily. A drop of prevention is worth an ocean of cure. Bonding with our babies is among the most important things we can do to give them a securely attached start. 

We are fortunate that there are ways to resolve our birth trauma and that there are practitioners in the world equipped to help us do that. I’ve been very lucky to find some of the best and to study and work with them. I’ve been privileged to witness the ordinary miracle of healing in so many people of all ages. 

2012 brings a quickening. Each of us is being called to stand for what we know in our hearts to be true and to stand with all humanity to usher in a new dimension of thinking; a lighter way of being on Earth. We do not need to agree with everyone; we need only to stand in our truth and keep an open heart.

Action seems to be the antidote to feeling poisoned or imprisoned by the past. Our actions this year may have more immediate relevance to our collective future than during any other year of our life.

My personal action seems to be to rally folks to make changes in how we welcome our next generation.

What is YOUR call to action?

Here’s what the Mayan Elders are saying about December 21, 2012: (click on seri-worldwide.org link below) 

http://www.seri-worldwide.org/id435.html

With thanks to Dave and Patricia Rudolph for sending me the link.

AWOL in ER with Mom and Seven A's

Midnight and a quarter.

MyMondayMuse beckons me to show up as my writer self before I hit the hay.

The trouble is I’ve been awol all day.

My 92 year old mama lost her lunch and dinner Saturday and then her breakfast Sunday morning. She’d fainted in her chair earlier in the afternoon Saturday and had a rattly cough. Fearing dehydration we decided to take her to Kaiser’s Emergency Room.

The gal at the nurse’s desk, when I called about mom, was kind enough to request a non-emergency transport to pick us up AND bring us back, so I got to ride shot-gun with TWO very cute, very young EMTs... one of whom has a lot of friends who work at The Painted Turtle. (He’d noticed my husband’s Painted Turtle hoodie as he and mom’s care-giver Ellen were preparing to follow the ambulance to Kaiser.) So we talked about camp. The ride-back-driver was into military reading - all about the Navy Seal who trained the team of six who took out Bin Laden and how this guy was an adrenaline junkie and LOVED his work and was soooo very good at planning security raids. Wow. I learned things I’d never be privy to had I not gotten to ride shot-gun!

Meanwhile... back in the ER they tested and poked, drained and filled, EKG’d and otherwise observed Mama Barbara for 10 hours and sent her home with anti-biotics for some infection of unknown origin. Her lungs are clear... maybe her teeth... maybe a UTI. She surely perked up with the saline drip, some Tylenol for the fever and some antibiotics in her IV. We sang some songs, but mostly she snored.

One way I passed the time was by reading aloud from my book, “When the Body Says No” by Gabor Mate, which explores the stress/disease connection. VERY wonderful book. The last chapter puts forth Dr. Maté’s Seven A’s of Healing. As a preamble to that list he encourages some negative thinking - meaning that if all we do is “positive thinking” we relegate all our shadow material to somewhere deep in our body where it can wreak havoc - particularly repressed anger. Turns out there are behaviors that predict certain diseases... like being overly nice all the time to everybody is associated with ALS; while repressed anger can lead to cancer and autoimmune diseases. (Now, don't do as I did and start self-diagnosing, chastising and berating yourself! Read the book! It's about having compassion for the little kid in us who derived the best survival strategies s/he could!)

Rats who are aggressive when kept in too close quarters with other rats have much lower tumor growth rates than those who are more docile. Anger (number three on the A list) when expressed can jump start the immune system. Fascinating!

The other A words include Acceptance, Awareness, Autonomy, Attachment, Assertion and Affirmation. It’s not the words that count but the exploration of how we came to certain beliefs early in life which may not be useful to us now - and actually may be killing us slowly! Got to explore the dark to get to the light, eh? (A?)

I’d only got half way through Autonomy when the ambulance came to take mom and me home. I’ll finish the book tomorrow... along with all the other tasks that went undone today.

Mostly I’m relieved she IS home and eager to see how she fares tomorrow with gatorade and antibiotics. yum. Mark made a delicious dinner for me! Sure tasted good after a day of nuts, raisins and crackers from the bottom of my purse!

From the bottom of my heart I thank all those EMTs, RNs, MDs and assorted specialists who helped an old lady and her even older mother Sunday.