Beloved


“I greet you from the other side
Of sorrow and despair
With a love so vast and shattered
It will reach you everywhere.”
~Leonard Cohen, A Heart With No Companion

Some time ago a man challenged me to write about how my daughter and husband experienced their sufferings. He thought it might allow me to go deeper than I had previously gone with my writing, with my healing. So I wrote something for him. I will now try again.

Bob fought for his life; he gave it everything he had. The last time I saw him in hospice he was calm. He had begun to receive morphine. The end was near. It was December 19, 2004, when I last saw him alive. I don’t know how it was for him. My sister had come from Pennsylvania to be with him. I was at home resting, as was our son.

She never said much about his last hours. (He died on December 20.) She said that she chanted softly most of the day. She discovered that there was a Hershey Kiss on his supper tray. She took that as a sign, since her teacher, Ammachi, always distributed Kisses at darshan. She chopped it up and fed it to him in tiny pieces. He was on his way home. I knew it would not be long and I didn’t want to be there. I couldn’t have anyway because he was waiting for her to get there. She it would be who would surrender him to the light. I cry as I write this. You know how I am.

But now I am writing about him, about how he must have felt. He had started to transition right before we took him to hospice. He had begun seeing things that we could not see, but he was not in pain. We never said goodbye because he never gave up. We had planned on moving him back into the hospital the following day so he could receive more transfusions. But he bled out before that would happen.

He never looked that bad, never looked horrific, like our daughter had. He was a big man, a regal-looking man, and he died in all of his dignity. I carry this in my body on a cellular level. Bob hung around the earth plane until his body simply could go no more. He wanted to stay and protect me. Someone who could see the other side said this to me, “Bob watched over you like a mother hen for the first three years after his death. But he has moved on. He has work to do, so he touches in when you need him.

Right before I published Life With A Hole In It, he came to me on the astral level. He said, “Your prayers are written on the wall of my heart every day.” It’s good to know that.

Thank you for allowing me to write truly for all of these years. I have written circles of light around myself. Hopefully they have included you as well. “I want you to find your passion before I die,” he said to me right after his diagnosis. And I have.

It is time for me to try some new things. I am not sure what they will be. But this I know. I am loved and I am taking flight. I am not in favor of the intellectual knowledge of love or of discussing it. Raw honesty is how I roll. Cut the onion and peel away the layers. As Natalie Goldberg’s teacher said to her, “Just swim. Just swim. Go on with your story.”

Vicki Woodyard

The Other Side

“I greet you from the other side
Of sorrow and despair
With a love so vast and shattered
It will reach you everywhere.”

~Leonard Cohen, A Heart With No Companion

I am a work in progress, as is my writing. I lurch from one side of Nonduality Street to the other, whirling like a word dervish as I go. Some of you can probably identify. There is no central self, as my teacher, Vernon Howard, used to say. The ego consists of many selves vying for control of the body/mind and no one ever has a remote chance of winning.

But not to lose heart, the Self in all of its clarity is a beacon to the surrendered one, which in fact, it is. One without a second, without having to say, “gimme a second…” as the ego is wont to do.

Like thousands, I am a great fan of Leonard Cohen, whom someone dubbed The Spin Doctor of the Apocolypse. He is not afraid to embody multiplicity while bringing us into self-unity. We vibrate to his chord. We know that as wine-stained as his tie may be, he is the Perfect One, letting us share a taste of what impels him to perform at the age of 78.

Leonard Cohen floats many boats; he is an ocean of bliss, watching his broken banjo “bobbing on a dark infested sea.” He is, of course, speaking of his unavoidable demise. Baby boomer nondualists are just now coming to terms with their mortality. Like Ram Dass after his stroke, Leonard is singing to a crowd he has known for ages. Showing us that aging can be cool. HIs wisdom winds us around his little finger. He crooks it and we come running.

I got to see Leonard Cohen perform at the Fox Theater in Atlanta in 2010. It was one of those nights with magic stamped all over it. I had bought nosebleed seats for my son and I, who agreed to accompany me. He is a volunteer tour guide at the Fox. We were milling about in the lobby when an usher waved at him. Rob and I went to where he was standing. “I’ve got some tickets left in this section and you can have them,” he said, motioning us to prime real estate in the audience. Thus I got to actually see Leonard as a person rather than as a dim speck from the cheap seats.

I can only say this. Leonard Cohen wrote the book. And he sings it very well.

Vulnerability

I woke up this Mother’s Day morning feeling vulnerable. I had dreamt of my brother and his family stopping by my house en route to somewhere else. There was a large crowd of his inlaws, children, etc. and I realized there was only my son and I and I felt envy that he was surrounded by a tribe. It is true; I am much alone. How can it be otherwise?

When I accept this, the in breath comes and I remember myself. I can “taste” the energy of truth entering my body. For the moment I am awake. I know my sadness, know that it is part and parcel of who I am and that it cannot be denied. I also know that it can serve others if I allow it.

It is raining and the trees are soddenly green and I am suddenly seeing. We all come into this world preprogrammed and we live out our destinies one day at a time. Some days are okay; others find us tossed in the fire and roasted. These are fires of purification, not punishment.

Holidays crawl for me. I have an inherent dislike of them. I do not belong in a holiday. I belong in something comfortable doing ordinary things. After holidays I like to buy candy on sale, but I have vowed to give up the sugar habit to some extent. Not totally, but as best I can.

What does this have to do with nonduality? What does nonduality have to do with me? Everything rises and falls together. The tides pull at us and the winds screech into our bony frames. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And in the meantime, vulnerability reigns.

Tapping into the Pain


Tapping into the pain. It isn’t hard; it is inevitable. Every sigh, every sorrow enters into the writer that I am. Opening up the sluice gates to an ocean of ecstasy, just beyond the letting go, just beyond the pain.

Somewhere angels await me, comfort me, hold me. And I always write what is in my heart. Inside of me are canyons, crevices, inlets, still pools. All waiting to reveal what is.

I have been working with the phrase, “It is a perfect world.” And it is. Just beyond the imperfections, perfection is guaranteed. I remember visiting a shell shop on the beach at La Jolla. There were steep steps leading down to a place where the ocean pooled among craggy rocks. It was a scary descent that winded me and coming up was just as hard. But the bottom and the top contain the middle. And the middle is where nothing seems to be happening.

I have been through so many middles, places along the awakening trail where tears kept falling, falling. The world went on as I simply endured one day at a time. But now I tap into the pain as a teaching device. As a way of revealing the jewel in the lotus. How can it shine until it has been burnished over a long period of commitment. You tell me. How can it be otherwise?

Vicki Woodyard

Prayerful—An Excerpt from A Guru in the Guest Room

Swami and I have a prayer together every morning. It is for our own centering that we pray. Swami feels that being off-center is a bigger sin than almost anything else. He insists that we sit on folding chairs with our backs straight and our heads bowed. We let our hands hang loose in our laps.
Silence is the centering mechanism for both of us. It is like putting a level on a crooked picture. The silence levels the inner life right up because what is off-bubble is screaming for your attention. It feels like a brown shoe in a white shoe world. We look at the brown shoe and with focused energy on it, we breathe it out and let it go. We continue breathing until there are only white shoes left. Don’t take this too literally since Swami usually wears slippers.

As we sit in silence together, I feel the love that Swami exudes with every breath he takes. This tiny man has the biggest heart of anyone I know. How I drew him to me is the biggest mystery of all. The silence extends into the other rooms of the house. Our bedrooms, the hall, kitchen and living room are touched by the soundlessness arising from within our hearts. My heart is not as big as Swami’s, but it is beating in harmony with his. That gives me hope and the knowledge that for everything there is a season.

Swami’s silliness over celebrity is just another game for the old man. He knows how radically all who love him are changed. It is nothing that he does, of course. You know this, by now. It is what he is that changes people. When we stand up, we hear our bodies creaking. Swami is the first to break the silence. “Well, Vicki,” he says with vim, vigor and vitality, “let’s eat!” I head for the kitchen, knowing that the cinnamon rolls are begging to be buttered. I can hardly wait.
P.S. For those of you who don’t know or keep forgetting, Swami is a fictional character and I take no responsibility for what he does when I am off duty. If he gets under your skin or into your heart, don’t tell me—tell him. Talk about a guru throwing you back on yourself.

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More Than Anything

More than anything, Swami Z is a scent. Smelling like vanilla must be a sure sign of gurudom because Swami attracted me by his scent. Often I experience the guru’s oneness as an aroma, nothing more. When I try to pin the scent down, it floats away. Yet when I seek nothing for myself, the scent comes to me unbidden and lingers in my hair. His teachings are like that, too.

He is obsessed with home to the point of idiocy. He says that he moved in with me because my little house attracted him and my suffering opened the door. He sits in the kitchen most of the time, blending wisdom with whatever he happens to be doing in there. He also likes to sit by the fire in the fall and winter, occasionally sharing an insight that he knows I am unready to hear. Then he sits back and enjoys my consternation.
“You know, don’t you, that I came to live with you because I needed a roof over my head,” he reminded me one late fall afternoon. “I had run out of places to stay. Everyone had kicked me out. No one is as gracious as you.” He was clearly playing me for a fool.

“Now, Swami, that is just so not the truth,” I hmmphed. “You told me that you moved in with me because you liked that my sheets were of such high quality—that they made wonderful outfits for you.” The little man with the dough just sat there, giving me plenty of rope with which to hang myself. It is said that when the pupil is ready, the master appears. That is definitely true. And mine appears to be crazy. But no mind, I belong to him now and he belongs to me. I guess that makes us two of a kind, but what kind I don’t know. Swami Z looked at me and suggested a game of poker.

“I think your content has settled,” I remarked.

“Not to worry, every ounce is still there,” he shot back, offering me a handful of Cocoa Puffs. We often ate them on the side. For example, for dinner we might have pasta with Puffs, or pepperoni pizza with a side of cereal. My teeth were being cut on the daily dharma that went crunch, which reminded me, I had a dental appointment. When Swami first told me that dental karma was the worst, I bit.

“Why is that, Swami?” I said, running my tongue over my lower teeth.

“Because your teeth are hard on the outside and soft on the inside, just like you. You don’t know how bad the pain is until something goes wrong. Then you drill and drill until—voilà—rot.” I hate to tell you that he enjoyed telling me this, but he did. I can’t figure out if his teeth are false or real. He never lets me get that close to him. He is like vanilla in that if you get an actual taste of him, pure and undiluted, you will find him unsavory. He must be mixed throughout before he becomes the most useful. I bow to him and his scintilla of truth—maybe he doesn’t even have that. I am the most deluded disciple that he has. Just ask him.

Excerpted from A Guru in the Guest Room, by Vicki Woodyard.

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Reviews Like This Keep Me Going

“It was by accident that I came across the site of Ms.Vicki Woodyard—a sort of serendipity. I was looking for what the nondual thinkers of our time are telling about this subject. Suddenly I jumped into her site- “Nonduality Now.” It was designed clean and orderly. The pages gave the glimpse of a lady, dealing with the paradoxes of life, the tragedies, the loss of her beloved daughter and the husband of a lifetime.

It was a different form of nonduality and her writing had an air of sublime sorrow that pervaded the pages, and finally it went back to where it should be—the Source. She included much fiction, fancies and lore that were alien to me. Her style was seductive and the diction profound and I had to go back to my little Oxford often to know what she meant. To my dismay, my little Oxford did not contain many of her words and puns. I thought, Lord am I with another Shakespeare, still elusive—I posted some comments in her site and alas! they were viewed all over the world. The accessibility of her site amazed me, and by experience, I had known that accessibility of the soul is the true mark of genius. If I am not with Shakespeare, I am surely with somebody who is real.”

M.N.Rajkumar

Training Wheels

Robert Bly once said, of growing older: “I was very surprised to
find out, as my poems pick up more and more of the past of
human beings, the ancient culture, more and more of the grief
and the suffering of human beings — the poems become funnier!
I don’t understand that, but I love it. I feel that there’s some way
that as the mind gets more mature, in the midst of a lot of grief,
it’s able to dance a little!” From Nonduality Highlights, Gloria Lee
4464 – Monday, December 26, 2011 – Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights  

Words Are Training Wheels

Words are training wheels.
A young soul needs them studying
books of philosophy and such.
It becomes too much
so one fine day
the training wheels come off
and whee! comes into play.
The void awaits on roller skates
it hurls you into outer space
and words are just the things you
needed until you didn’t anymore.

~Vicki Woodyard

The Life of a Spiritual Hermit

I am going to be on Fred Davis’ Awakening Clarity blog as a guest teacher next week and he has just added some of my quotes to his blog. Fred and I have something in common; we prefer the hermit life. By the toss of the genetic dice, hermits are born for solitude. One who takes to the path of awakening gets a double dose of this love of solitude. We understand the desert fathers.

I chose a teacher that made it clear that awakening is not something for public consumption. It is done in private and does not require a single social element. We work alongside each other but in silent awareness. This silent awareness speaks through one’s energy. Mine happens to be more effective when I am alone. With people, I am not free to declare my intention of being present. Chit chat does not deliver the goods.

Writing is something that allows me to communicate the energy of awakening without the need to yammer. There is enough of that as it is. People are yammering into their iphones nonstop. The digital age is upon us and soon genetic introversion will be bred out of the species. At that point we will be born wired and die yammering.

Not me.