Conceptual awareness can’t help you make it through the night.  Yes, I said it. Loud and clear. Sometimes we are rocked with shocks intended to wake us up, but something else is needed. When Bob lay dying in hospice less than a week before Christmas in 2004, I sat in a stunned state in his crowded little room. My heart and soul were as weary as they had ever been. I had done my best and it wasn’t enough. He was on the way out and going within was not an option at the moment. I couldn’t access anything but numbness; the shock had already set in. His body was on the way out. His dear presence would soon be only a memory. And nothing, not even awareness, was going to spare me from the grief. (Let this cup pass from me comes to mind.)

At that moment, if a neoadvaitan had put his head into the room and told me that the story was unreal, I would have gobsmacked him. There is a time for the human being to weep and a time for him/her to dance. There was no dancing in that room. Bob had fought tooth and nail to stay alive. He had climbed out of the railed bed and been found on the floor. “I was going to the second floor,” was what he told the nurse when she found him.  There was no second floor. He flat out wanted to live. The path had become, for him, a fight to the finish. I was too tired to fight.

On Christmas Eve, 2004, we had just buried Bob. Instead of a principle, we received an actual person. Her name was, believe it or not, Mary Frances, and she worked at the Marriott Courtyard across from St. Francis  Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee—a nice symbolism. She didn’t talk to us of being no one. She instead busied herself with making a Christmas dinner in the lobby of the desert motel. We were iced in and forlorn. She changed that motel lobby into a living experience of truth and goodness. We ate and laughed together. She told my little family of four to promise her one thing—that we would not wait this long again to hold a family reunion.

There was no conceptual awareness spit out in intellectual phrases about entities and non-existence. I understood the existence of love as a given, as a healing and a promise. That has been enough for me.

This week was my birthday and Thanksgiving. Not being a lover of holidays, the stress level automatically rises. But there is a certain headiness in being free of family obligations. It has not always been that way, for I have served my time of putting up with the exhaustion of cooking dinner while the male contingency looked on. I was always aware that the female bore the brunt of all holidays.

So my son and I eat out on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. We are quiet souls who actually don’t mind being non-celebratory. Being inner driven is a grace not given to everyone. Even so, I allow twinges of self-pity to sneak in and rob me of awareness. My writing keeps me honest and not being tied down with relatives allows me to focus on the absolute. I have great compassion for those suffering illnesses and bereavements during the holidays for I have been there more than once.

This is my time and my season to celebrate the Self. That which is not dependent on ritual, obligation or commerce. I turn within and see the simplicity of being whole. It takes no lofty point of view to do this. It has been wrenched out of me, this particular brand of introspection. I have paid the price and now offer advice to all of those of you alone at this time. Perhaps it means you are ready to take yourself on, the self that has robbed you of peace and silence. Maybe it is time to sit back and let yourself by served by the One within us all.

Hello, Everyone,

This is your flight captain speaking to you from wherever they speak to you from! Trust me—the food on this leg of your trip will be lip-smackin’ good. The writer (that would be me), is capable of launching you into a new nondual experience. You will be aware of yourself in a new way, but this cannot be described. If I had to use one word, I would say “spontaneously rewarding,” for that is how I write. Off the cuff, straight from the hip, brass tacks and truth guaranteed. I calls ‘em like I sees’ em.

Perhaps you want to know what nonduality is. Ask yourself who you are, really, and you will get a taste of it. A conscious culinary pleasure.

I would like to get some input on how the flight is going for you. I have complimentary blankets, earphones and cornpone. Free coffee, tea or me, your captain. I have no idea what they call female pilots. I guess they call ‘em pilots.

I have been known to mix a mean Realitini….that would be a cocktail of wisdom, craziness and honesty. You won’t be disappointed. Each time I post a new piece, may you go along for the ride. This is nonduality up close and personal. Please take off your shoes and leave a comment before you depart the plane.

And thank you for flying Nonduality Air today. Book us again often. Frequent flier miles are available and the pilot has a new book out. The title is LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT: That’s How The Light Gets In. You can get a copy by reaching over to the right side of your plane or overhead and click on the appropriate link. Word on the street is that it is a-mazing and that puts me on Cloud Nine.

“A person can have the temporary approval of his friends or he

can have his own life, but he cannot have both.”

Vernon Howard

After Bob died, I vowed to move as deeply as possible into my own life. He had been my mainstay and ballast. An honorable man, he sheltered me from many things, but nothing can shelter one from him or herself. Deep down, I always knew that.

My teacher had taught self-reliance as a core principle and now I returned to it full-time. I began to care for myself with respect and attention. What I discovered was mind-boggling. I had never needed to lean on Bob, as willing as he was. I just “thought” I did. My thoughts were neatly packaged into categories and Bob was one of them. “He can gas up the car; he can take care of the income tax, etc.” Now I am doing everything he did and the world hasn’t come to an end.

What he couldn’t take care of was my own emotional baggage. Now I felt like I was unpacking suitcase after suitcase of stuff that no longer belonged to me. It was all jumbled up, too; like your clothes after a week’s vacation. Everything just randomly pressed together and needing to be cleaned. I began to see things that no longer worked. It was like I had been going places and doing things that were of no interest to me. So I simplified my inner life. I spent lots of time just  looking into the window of my mind. And the more I looked, the less I saw. Emptiness began to matter more than fullness. I treasured my morning meditations. In the brown recliner I bought for myself shortly after he died, I would sit gently with myself. My breath was my  own, after all, as was my life.

His illness began to recede into the distance as I moved his clothes from the closet and began my new life. At first I was frugal to the point of being ridiculous. I didn’t know how money I would have. Then I realized it was the little things that I enjoyed. A box of bath powder, a scented candle, a book that made me laugh. And so the big things became about self-care. I was giving myself time to just live on this earth.

No was my favorite word for a long time. Grief requires a severe pruning back of activity so the soul can bloom again. I sought solace within and not from without. I wrote a lot and realized this was to be my path. Words piled up like snow on a winter night but they warmed me in a significant way. Now I wanted to warm others from the reflected light.

My new website is where the words will be read and hopefully another book will arise one page at a time. Bob is loving me from the only possible place he ever could—from within my heart. I was having my own life returned to me in the form of self-love and my husband will forever be a part of that. I was learning to have my own life.

Vicki Woodyard

Being a spiritual writer is my passion and delight. Why? Because it comes from something deeper than the ego. All I do is open to the flow and let my fingers do the talking. I especially love it when they are funny or when they go so deep I sigh. At this moment, I have no idea what is arising. So let us wander down the page together, you and I.

Yesterday at my Cancer Wellness writing group we wrote about thankfulness. The leaves were a marvel of reds and golds (our writing room is in a tall building and the walls are glassed in on three sides. For some reason I wrote this:

There were too few days on earth with Laurie (my daughter). On one Thanksgiving, she and  her brother, Rob, wore construction paper Pilgrim buckles on their shoes. My mother was here to visit and we gathered for the meal at our kitchen table. Such days went up in smoke. The smallest pilgrim died. So unfair. And I write of both big things and small. Construction paper buckles—what would they bring on eBay? What do they bring in a mother’s heart?

A sigh, a tenderness, a knowing how evanescent is this life. The littlest pilgrim always loved the black olives in the relish dish. Do I love less because she is gone—or more? Some days I don’t even remember I had such a child. But the heart never forgets. Her sly smile may be behind my writing. She sure hated for me to cry.

So the little writing group listened to each one’s writing in turn. There is always a choice as to whether you want to share or not.  We finished the session with some poetry-writing. Here is mine:

On Earth

Looking requires a soft alertness.

A wilting of the

mind,

A relaxing of the stance.

Being requires of you but one thing.

That one thing is itself the

answer to why you are here

on earth.

The missing link in the chain of spirituality is self-love. We come to this astonishing discovery only after we have tried desperately to change ourselves, fix ourselves, reinvent ourselves adnauseum. None of it worked because there was no self-love behind it. Charity begins within.

Self-love is something that all of the great spiritual masters lived. Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is within. He meant that it is within our own consciousness. Self-love cannot be bestowed by another. And the paradox is that we are all love. Love powers the universe.

When I lost my daughter to a childhood cancer at the age of seven, I was only 35 years old. I was in my early forties before I even began to heal. Grief for a child is different than for any other. You are facing not only the loss of the child, but their children’s children. The blank space not only opens up daily but also for generations. This loss set my feet firmly on the spiritual path. I began to read hundreds of books related to that subject. The Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda was given to me by my mother. It was my first taste of eastern spirituality. Yogananda loved the Christ as well as Krishna. He showed me that love is love is love….

Still I had years ahead of me to make the astonishing discovery that self-love is the linchpin of life. Without that, we are useless to others because we will project our self-loathing onto them. I certainly tried. I often made life miserable for my family in the years after my daughter died. My husband and I were left with an eleven-year-old son who had his own grieving to do. My husband tried to neatly solve the problem of grief by becoming a workaholic. His self-love was on the back burner just as mine was. Just as everyone’s is. For our culture teaches us to love our neighbor as ourself. What it doesn’t reveal is that we must love ourselves first. That is the right order.

There is a wonderful book called I Come As A Brother, by Mary Margaret Moore. That book had a sentence that leapt out at me and changed my consciousness forever. She said that WE need love ourselves. And in so many words, until that happens, we cannot give what we don’t have.

So I began the daily practice of sitting quietly in my chair first thing in the morning and saying: I choose to love myself. Five little words that took me in a different direction. The scriptures became living lessons for me now. Once I chose to love myself, I could love my neighbor, for you are your neighbor. There is no division in the world of love. Your own wholeness feeds the multitudes with baskets of loaves and fishes left over. Your own consciousness leads the way to your healing.

Joel Goldsmith of The Infinite Way and author of many books, was an extraordinary mystic. He discovered that he was the “I am that I am.” So are we all. But we must do as he did, sit in silence affirming this until it becomes second nature to us, until it clicks. You will feel your body shifting from mechanical energy to conscious energy, allowing your being to purr like a contented cat. For now, everything is in right order. You have faith that within you is the power to move mountains, within you is love itself.

So if you are serious about learning to love yourself, do this. Sit down first thing in the morning and say, “I choose to love myself. I am in God’s presence now.” That is it. All you have to do. Your energy, by law, will change for the better. Then get  up and go about your day. I like to put myself in a balloon of white light as well, asking that I  may send love to others without receiving any of their stress and tension. Try it. Change your life from a mechanical one to a conscious one. It is worth your time on earth to learn to live for eternity. And love is the building block…always.

Listen to Solomon Burke sing None of Us Are Free

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I love my little book. Everything about it. Alan Larus took the cover shot and he lives in Norway, so the scene is from far away, but it is radiantly beautiful and just right to symbolize the title and subtitle.

This morning I drank a cup of tea and reread the book for the umpteenth time. Oh, yes, I love it that much. It speaks to me of love between the lines, between health and sickness, between tears and laughter. I lived much of it between the cracks, feeling stuff that was indecipherable in words.

My tall, strong husband (he was 6 ft. 4) became my child towards the end of his illness. I, who had been a southern belle of sorts, now became a preview of coming attractions, a steel magnolia in the making. I, who had been a diligent spiritual student, now became the path itself. No choice in any of this, I might add. It was a grueling, choiceless experience.

These days I am enjoying “having written.” Deep within my soul I am sprouting hope and joy, something I went without like a camel in the desert. These seeds will bear fruit in time. All I have to do is let the light shine. And between the rows of hope and I joy I wander down the page. I turn them one at a time, savoring the connection I have now made with readers. They know me like the back of their hand, because my story is theirs as well.

If you haven’t read it yet, perhaps you will want to read about how I went from sorrow to sunlight once again. It was an arduous journey, one made in heartache and futility. Letting go was not an option; it was written in the stars. Now they wink again with light. That is how it is and how it happened.

Last night I was with my women’s group, Mary & Martha’ s Place, for their fundraising event. Everyone looked wonderful, like walking palettes of art made into clothing. There was wonderful food and an artists’ market in which to indulge the senses. I bought four things. A wonderful little painting with a recycled eyeglass in the center. It says, “Keep Seeking.” On the old lens is painted a little white bird with a heart drawn in its chest. There is a leaf at each corner of the painting and two trees bearing salmon-colored leaves on the side.

The second item I bought is a handmade cloth cross that is eight inches long. It is wrapped in a variety of cloth, the overall color of the cross consisting of salmon, orange and yellow. The third item is a small handmade doll. She has brown hair, black eyes and tan skin. She wears a felted orange top and a skirt made of yellow, aqua and green.  I also bought a handmade bar of soap called Buffalo Bird Woman. It is blended with blue corn, sage and cedar. I love all of these handmade beauties.

The  little doll embodies my own creative spirit. She has a sweet red yarn smile and two shiny black bead eyes.  She is expecting miracles.

There are many ways to feed the spirit. The theme of the evening was Risk Living The Creative Life. I have been doing that for years now and it only gets better with time.

I hope you come to love reading my blog. It is a labor of love for me, always. The spirit that moves within me cherishes the small— like little dolls and crosses and bars of handmade soap.  The mind has its uses, but the child within had rather play. I have cried enough tears; it is good to make room for simple joys again.

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Jerry Katz  and I on Nonduality Street Radio. He features me on the show and does a great job of presenting my material. I chat about my work, etc.  Give it a listen.

Behind the Mind

Behind the mind lies a field of universal awareness. It is yours. Take but one step into it and you become it. Actually, you have always been it; the becoming is only seeming.

Do this. When you catch yourself trying to think your way out of the illusion, unzip your mind and take a step into awareness. That place of light that is who you really are.

Don’t let thinking fool you into suffering. Let awareness heal you instantly.

Awareness is on the spot. It is who you are and it is what breaks through the clouds of thought.