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Ep 5 Bonus: Breathing Through

This bonus episode will support you to take the main insights from Episode 4: There is No Future if We Go Numb and Episode 5: This Pain Is Not for Nothing, deeper into your life. 

Both of these episodes are about the second phase in the Spiral of the Work That Reconnects, Honoring Our Pain for the World. This bonus is a recording of Joanna leading a meditation called Breathing Through, recorded at a retreat in 2006. In it, she’ll guide you to create space to acknowledge and honor the pain for the world that you carry without numbing or getting overwhelmed. All you’ll need for this bonus exercise is a place where you can close your eyes and relax.  

We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.

 

Growing through the Peak of Your Pain

A doctor of Chinese medicine who was a famous bonesetter in China once said to me with a heavy accent, “Here, you [meaning Americans] don’t like to feel pain. You don’t like to suffer.” He said this as he wrung my neck as one would a chicken’s, snapping it back and forth in a way I had never experienced. I screamed as if he were breaking my bones.

For a month prior, I hadn’t been able to move my head to the left or right. My left arm was nearly immobile. I had just started a new job that probably should have ended the moment my body locked up. I went for acupuncture, then pain pills; used ice and hot water bottles. I went to medical doctors, and they X-rayed the area and gave me more pills and a brace to keep my head still—the kind used for whiplash. I later tried one of the best chiropractors in the city, and she gave me the number of a neurosurgeon, thinking I had a herniated disk and would need surgery. I did not seek out the surgeon and stayed in pain for weeks. Finally, a friend from my job gave me the number of her doctor, the famous bonesetter mentioned above. I called him at 10:00 pm that night. That’s how much pain I was in. To my surprise, he answered the phone. He said, “Come in. I wait for you.”

I said, “Now?”

“Yes!” he said. “You have pain, come now.”

Wow, I thought. Now that’s a healer. It didn’t matter that it was the middle of the night.

My partner at the time drove me across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, and I met my friend from work at the healer’s office. She had come to translate from Mandarin to English. The place was tiny, with photos on the wall of city dignitaries and other famous people who were his clients.

“Hi.” The bonesetter smiled like a boy. “I’m Dr. Fu.”

I sat down in his small room and showed him my X-ray. He threw it on the floor without looking at it. He took the brace off my neck and threw that on the floor, too, right next to the X-ray. Then he twisted me into a pretzel. I howled, yelped, screamed, and hollered.

All of it. No wonder he had me come when no other patients were there. He told me to breathe, and I did my best. Suddenly, at the peak of the pain, I felt my muscles release in my neck, shoulders, and back. It was in fact a miracle to me. I had suffered so long.

I carried my brace and X-ray out in my hands. It was as if I had never been in pain or unable to move. The night sky filled with stars made me feel like I was on another planet. I was in bliss. When I returned to work, everyone was shocked. Was it a miracle, or was it the ability to withstand a greater amount pain to be free of the pain? I would have never imagined that I needed to go deeper into the pain, deeper into the darkness of it. All I had wanted was out.

We are averse to pain and suffering and understandably so, given our American sensibility. We have access to a large market of remedies, products, spiritual paths, and, yes, gateways to the freedom from suffering. I wonder how many times we have diverted our own freedom when we have discovered there is more pain, more trouble, more darkness ahead and we keep adding on remedies. What is the mindset, along with fear and terror, that causes us to avoid our suffering rather than go deeper into seeing what is there? Yes, I should have quit that job on the spot when the pain started, even though I had been there for only a few weeks. I didn’t know at the time, but the pain that was deep inside was because I wanted something different for my life than the job I had accepted. The pain was my impatience, and it was at the same time physical pain in real time. I didn’t wait to allow that“something different” to be revealed in the darkness.

Since all paths—religious, spiritual, or without name—intersect in the place of darkness, darkness is the place where the mind is forced to detach itself from whatever it has grabbed onto in life. And in that nothingness, in that dark place, we awaken.

What of darkness terrorizes us so that we run from it, rather than go deeper into it? How can we bear dark times, or, more explicitly, horrifying times, with the skill of an awakened one? Misery, struggle, and sorrow are not the sole intentions of this life. Yet we can respect our interrelationship with everything in the world, including the suffering in, around, and between us. Is there a way to live in unsettling times that we have forgotten?

Excerpted from Opening to Darkness: Eight Gateways for Being with the Absence of Light in Unsettling Times by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel.

Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, PhD, is an author, poet, ordained Zen Buddhist priest, teacher, and artist, whose diverse background, education, and experience all provide a unique integral and cultural perspective within the space of religion and spirituality. She is the author of The Shamanic Bones of Zen, The Way of Tenderness, The Deepest Peace, and more. Manuel is a native of California and now resides in New Mexico. Learn more at zenju.org.

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Jules Blaine Davis: Meet the Kitchen Healer

For eons, women have gathered around the place of cooking—the fire, the hearth, the kitchen—to share wisdom and nourish each other through love and compassion and yes, food. In her new book, The Kitchen Healer: The Journey to Becoming You, Jules Blaine Davis celebrates the ways we nourish our bodies, hearts, and spirits in this cherished place. In our podcast, Tami Simon and Jules discuss how the kitchen gives us the opportunity to pause, grieve, and replenish—and to rewrite our stories over and over again. In true loving-healer fashion, Jules talks about our deep hunger to connect with each other in what has become “a cultureless culture,” and how the kitchen provides that essential space for reuniting with our longing, our joy, and each other. 

She shares her thoughts on the practice of simply being with our problems instead of fixing them, and how powerful it is to just give yourself an abundance of permission. Her joy and compassion radiate throughout this conversation, as does the promise of discovery through healing. Says Jules, “When we’re in the practice of healing, there’s no graduating from healing. We’re just unfolding. We’re unraveling. We’re becoming who we are over and over again in all the different beautiful places in our lives.”

Lavender Rose Chocolate Truffles

Lavender Rose Chocolate Truffles

From the book, Whole Girl by Sadie Radinsky

INGREDIENTS:

  • 1/2 cup coconut cream, from the top of a chilled 13 1/2-ounce can of full-fat coconut milk
  • 1 1/2 cups dark chocolate chips or chopped dark chocolate
  • 2 drops food-grade pure lavender oil
  • 1/4 cup cacao powder
  • 2 Tbsp dried rose petals, crushed

INSTRUCTIONS:

  1. Scoop the coconut cream into a double boiler. Heat the coconut cream until it’s hot to the touch, then pour in the chocolate. Turn the heat down to medium-low. Stir the chocolate and coconut cream together until the chocolate is fully melted and the mixture forms a shiny ganache.
  2. Remove the ganache from heat and stir in the lavender oil. Place the bowl of ganache in the refrigerator to chill for 2 hours, or until completely solid.
  3. Line a plate with parchment paper. Scoop the chocolate mixture into 16 pieces using a tablespoon, and place on the plate. Don’t worry about forming the pieces into spheres yet. Place the plate back in the refrigerator for 10 minutes to firm up.
  4. Pour the cacao powder and crushed rose petals into 2 small separate bowls. Roll the refrigerated chocolate blobs into balls, then roll them in either cacao powder, rose petals, or leave them plain. Serve.
  5. Store leftover Lavender Rose Chocolate Truffles in an airtight container in the refrigerator for about 1 week, or freeze for up to 1 month. Defrost before serving.

chocolate truffles

This recipe is featured in the young adult book, Whole Girl: Live Vibrantly, Love Your Entire Self, and Make Friends with Food by Sadie Radinsky.

 

sadie radinskySadie Radinsky is a 19-year-old blogger and recipe creator. For over six years, she has touched the lives of girls and women worldwide with her award-winning website, wholegirl.com, where she shares paleo treat recipes and advice for living an empowered life. She has published articles and recipes in national magazines and other platforms, including Paleo, Shape, Justine, mindbodygreen, and The Primal Kitchen Cookbook. She lives in the mountains of Los Angeles. For more, visit wholegirl.com.

 

 

 

 

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Meet a Coauthor of . . . Freedom for All of Us

The Author

Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, humanitarian, and one of three authors of Freedom for All of Us: A Monk, a Philosopher, and a Psychiatrist on Finding Inner Peace, available in November, 2020. He is also the author of several other books, including The Monk and the Philosopher, Happiness, and Altruism. He is a major participant in research collaboration between cognitive scientists and Buddhist practitioners. Ricard is a noted translator and photographer, and has founded humanitarian projects in India, Tibet, and Nepal. For more information, visit karuna-shechen.org.

Freedom for All of Us Cover

The Book

With their acclaimed book In Search of Wisdom, three gifted friends—a monk, a philosopher, and a psychiatrist—shed light on our universal quest for meaning, purpose, and understanding. Now, in this new in-depth offering, they invite us to tend to the garden of our true nature: freedom.

Filled with unexpected insights and specific strategies, Freedom for All of Us presents an inspiring guide for breaking free of the unconscious walls that confine us.

 

Send us a photo of your sacred space.

[Pictured here is the] Shechen Monastery in Nepal, where I live a good part of the year:

 

Monastery

 

[And] the views from my hermitage in Nepal:

 

vieew 1

 

 

view 2

 

If you could invite any three transformational leaders or spiritual teachers (throughout time) to dinner, who would they be and why?

I do not have dinner and he does not either, but if I had to choose to spend an hour quietly with someone alive today, it would be His Holiness the Dalai Lama. [He is] someone of boundless compassion and wisdom, who treats every sentient being—from the person who cleans the floor at the hotel when he travels, to a head of state—with the same kindness, respect, and attention.

As for [two people] who [are no longer] in this world, I would give everything to spend another hour in the presence of my two main spiritual teachers: Kangyur Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who inspire every instant of my life.

Has your book taken on a new meaning in the world’s current circumstances? Is there anything you would have included in your book if you were writing it now?

Many people have indeed faced great hardship; being sick, left alone, and having lost a dear one. But for those who simply had to be with themselves and a few kin, I was quite surprised to see how difficult they found [it] to just be with their own minds for extended periods of time. It seemed that it was such a new situation and they had few tools to deal with it.

As a contemplative, I value tremendously [the] time spent alone in my hermitage in the Himalaya[s], cultivating fundamental human qualities that allow me to slowly become a better human being. I believe that among those qualities, inner freedom and compassion are two key factors and that, therefore, our dialogue [in Freedom for All of Us] is quite timely. Most of the subjects that we reflect upon seem very relevant [during] these troubled times and I hope that they will be useful!

Freedom for All of Us Cover

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Rewilding Our Spiritual Practice

 

Mindfulness Rewilded

 

“As great as the infinite space beyond is the space within the lotus of the heart. Both heaven and earth are contained in that inner space, both fire and air, sun and moon, lightning and stars. Whether we know it in this world or know it not, everything is contained in that inner space.” 

THE CHANDOGYA UPANISHAD 

 

As someone inside “the mindfulness industry,” I have observed that yoga has become as deprived of nature as the rest of society. With our rubber-soled shoes, yoga mats, and indoor practice spaces, modern humans move from one nature-disconnected space to another. Even during those rare moments between the car and the studio, we wear shoes that prevent contact with the ground beneath our feet. Yet the practices of yoga and meditation were born in the mountains, forests, and deserts of Asia. 

 

A few years ago, I attended a yoga conference in Manhattan, a few floors up at the midtown Hilton. After my second yoga class in a stuffy, windowless room, with hundreds of yogis in spandex moving about on rubber mats, I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance. I love yoga—it is a powerful, beautiful practice—and I believe that the widespread increase in yoga and mindfulness practice is profoundly positive. However, something about this scenario didn’t seem quite right to me—or quite right for me. 

 

Not long after, at another yoga and recovery conference, my friend Tim Walsh, an avid outdoorsman and recovery coach, expressed my own thoughts when he said, “Folks, we’re standing on rubber mats inside a temperature-controlled room on the second floor of a giant brick building. How much more disconnected from the earth can you get!” His words rang inside me, and at that moment, something at my core woke up. I had felt this disconnect for years, and now it was time to do something about it. 

 

I had dreamed for many years of somehow bridging the worlds of meditation, yoga, and mindfulness with rewilding. When I finally started to research the connections between nature and mindfulness practices, I ended up creating programs for students at Kripalu that immersed us in forests and fields while practicing. I wanted to help people become conscious of their inner nature while out in nature and to help them see the importance of conserving our natural environments—the primal parts of ourselves. How did yoga and meditation, wild practices designed to awaken, empower, and enlighten, become so disconnected from the enlivening power and the beauty of the living earth? Because yoga and mindfulness have profound benefits for well-being, they have also been co-opted and commercialized. Products have proliferated—the mats and the clothing, the snacks and the food, the shoes and the hats. Our economy is driven by the consumption of things that must be extracted from the earth and produced and marketed and sold. As yoga and mindfulness became imbedded in modern culture’s mostly indoor lifestyle, these ancient practices also became cut off from the presence of the wind, sun, moon, and life of the living earth. 

 

When we disconnect from the living earth, we lose the life-affirming wisdom that is found outdoors. If we consider the fact that we are an evolutionary expression of the evolving earth, then our own self-awareness can be thought of as the self-awareness of the living earth itself. Which is a pretty powerful idea to ponder! And it means that human rewilding can lead to a rewilding of our spirit, a reinspiriting of our essential nature. 

 

Pacification or Liberation? 

 

Yoga and mindfulness today are often used to help people invite calm and to support greater self-regulation and impulse control in stressful situations. But just as I’m concerned about their commodification, I’m also concerned that these ancient practices are being used as pacifiers to help people put up with the negative effects of modern society, because these ancient practices are also the tools for true liberation from the root causes of our distress. 

 

To be clear, yoga, meditation, and mindfulness are extremely valuable practices. The abilities to take a deep breath and step back from the fight-or-flight response, to self-soothe, and to know when to practice self-care, these are all critical tools for living consciously. 

 

I am reminded of an episode of the old television show Kung Fu, in which a martial arts master, played by David Carradine, is taken prisoner and forced into manual labor under the blazing sun. Labeled a troublemaker, he is put into a hot box, a cast-iron oven with an unbearably fierce temperature. In the box is another man who is panicked by their dangerous situation. Carradine calmly teaches the man how to meditate, to slow his breathing and witness his thoughts. At the end of the day, they are released, and both emerge from the box alert and calm, much to the surprise of their captors. 

 

A more recent and real-life example is the group of boys on a soccer team in Thailand who were stranded for almost two weeks in a complex network of flooded tunnels. They learned to meditate from their coach, who had lived in a Buddhist monastery for 10 years. They sat in the darkness, not knowing if anyone would come to their aid, and they stayed calm and connected to one another. They were all ultimately saved by a team of divers who risked their own lives in the effort.

 

Meditation is a powerful antidote to fear and the modern daily stresses that can harm our health if left unchecked. Meditation can even save your life. But if you are under duress, the first thing to check is whether you can get out of it. See if the door to the hot box can be opened. Look for the escape route in the cave. If a change in the circumstances is possible, the wise action is to eliminate the cause of suffering first, and meditate later. 

 

As a species, we often don’t even know that we are in a hot box or a dangerous cave. The stress of modern life is ubiquitous, so a change of environment may not even seem like an option. And, of course, not everyone can get away from their circumstances or difficulties. Not everyone has easy access to pristine natural places. Many can’t afford to travel to a place with fresh air and water. 

 

I hope that the steps I teach in my book, Rewilding, for connecting with the living earth will open doors for everyone. The sunlight, the movement of air, the presence of the earth that is solid and stable even in asphalt, the dandelion coming up through a crack in the pavement, all can be entries into a wilder, more conscious, more awakened life. 

 

For more practices in rewilding, search for “Micah Mortali” on the Sounds True blog to read his other posts or find his book, Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature, at your favorite bookseller!

Micah Mortali is director of the Kripalu Schools, one of the largest and most established
centers for yoga-based education in the world. An avid outdoorsman, mindful wilderness guide,
500-hour Kripalu yoga teacher, and popular meditation teacher, Mortali has been leading
groups in wilderness and retreat settings for 20 years. In 2018, he founded the Kripalu School of
Mindful Outdoor Leadership. Mortali has a passion for helping people come home to themselves
and the earth, and he is finishing his master’s at Goddard College on nature awareness and
mindfulness practices. He lives with his wife and children in the Berkshires. For more, visit
micahmortali.com.

 

 

 

 

 

Read Rewilding today!

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