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The Hobo Code (for Spiritual Pilgrims)

Sounds True — June 24, 2013

Right behind the Sounds True office backyard, just a hop over tangled barbed wire, run these local railroad tracks:

The other day I was watching television’s most underrated exploration of the Jungian “shadow principle”—Mad Men—and it reminded me of these tracks. In the episode called “The Hobo Code,” we get a glimpse into the protagonist Don Draper’s childhood during the Great Depression. And we learn about a secret vocabulary that was chalked and carved on fence posts and telephone poles across America.

As it turns out, the hobo code was real. It varied from region to region and across the years. Countless souls used it to help each other find food and shelter and to avoid the perils of the day.

Here are some of those hobo signs (scraped from cyberspace) that still feel relevant to me, if only metaphorically:

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I spotted one of my first “hobo marks” decades ago. It came as a crackling transmission of Roy Tuckman’s legendary Pacifica Radio show “Something’s Happening.” I was homeless, hopeless, and definitely “hobo” at the time, couchsurfing in a friend’s farmhouse in Carmel, California.

The clock radio clicked to 2:00am and, drifting in and out of the night static, was the voice of Alan Watts. He was chuckling at the folly of “trying to catch an ocean wave in a bucket.” Which is exactly what I was doing with my life at that time—trying to rack up achievements and experiences that would assure my permanent, foolproof success.

Um, yeah, right.

Alan’s “hobo mark” pointed me onto the boxcar of radical self-inquiry, though I didn’t realize it until years later. And ever since, I’ve shared his humor and wisdom whenever it’s felt right to.

In fact, I had the privilege of working with Alan Watts’ son, Mark, to hand-pick the sessions for the audio set Out of Your Mind. Alan’s “catching waves in a bucket” allegory is in there.

Is the spiritual path so different from those rolling train tracks? Maybe the markers we find on our own journey—a haiku by Ikkyu, a meaningful photograph, the advice of a friend—reflect the same pilgrim’s spirit that says “we’re all in this together brothers and sisters.”

If I ever go back to visit Victoria’s family farm, I think I’m gonna chalk this symbol on their fencepost:

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So, what was your first metaphorical “hobo sign” on your life’s journey?

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Sera Beak: Red Hot and Holy, Part 2

Sera Beak — June 19, 2013

Tami Simon speaks with Sera Beak, a Harvard-trained scholar of comparative world religions and a dynamic new voice in modern spirituality. Sera spent years traveling the world to study with Sufi dervishes, Tibetan monks, Indian yogis, mystics, shamans, and more. She is the author of The Red Book, and with Sounds True her new book is Red Hot and Holy: A Heretic’s Love Story. In the second part of a two-part interview, Tami speaks with Sera about her experiences with sacred touch, shadow work, the power of “cosmic family therapy” to heal the wounds of someone in a different lifetime, and the revelation of knowing deep in our being that we are beloved. (61 minutes)

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Sera Beak: Red Hot and Holy, Part 1

Sera Beak — June 11, 2013

Tami Simon speaks with Sera Beak, a Harvard-trained scholar of comparative world religions and a dynamic new voice in modern spirituality. Sera spent years traveling the world to study with Sufi dervishes, Tibetan monks, Indian yogis, mystics, shamans, and more. She is the author of The Red Book, and her new book with Sounds True is Red Hot and Holy: A Heretic’s Love Story. In the first part of a two-part interview, Tami speaks with Sera about what she sees as the difference between spirit and soul, and what she learned during her own “red night of the soul.” She also speaks about the phenomenon of spiritual bypassing, and why she always sees the divine in shades of red. (60 minutes)

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The Self-Acceptance Project… wrap-up with Tami S...

Tami Simon — June 6, 2013

I loved hosting The Self-Acceptance Project, a free 23-part online video series in which I interview leading spiritual teachers, psychologists, writers and researchers about how to be kind and compassionate towards ourselves in any and every situation. I learned so much from hosting this series that I even created a final wrap-up video in which I share the seven key insights that were true “take-aways” for me. If you are interested, you can watch the video here.

One of the most important lessons that I learned from the series was how important it is to TURN TOWARDS difficult emotional experiences instead of our habitual response of turning away (turning to distraction or food or our iphone or other ways we self-medicate and try to numb ourselves). This is a teaching that I hear so often in Sounds True recordings and books (and as an aside, there are a number of self-acceptance themed titles and programs on sale this week – visit our self-acceptance tools and teachings page).

What I find so interesting is how I continually need to be reminded to turn towards difficult feelings. It is such a natural tendency to try escape feeling terrible! Sounds True author Bruce Tift (who along with 22 other Sounds True authors is featured as part of the Self-Acceptance series) said that the reason for this is that it is actually COUNTER-INSTINCTUAL to turn towards what is difficult. Our natural animal instinct is to avoid pain, which of course makes a lot of sense. But if we are to be intimate with our emotions and therefore intimate with ourselves and intimate with the flow of life, we need to make the counter-instinctual move and turn towards what we are feeling, even if it is difficult and painful.

Okay, so let’s say we accept this basic premise. How do we do it? Many of the authors in the self-acceptance series offered the same advice, first become aware of what’s happening (for example, I am mindlessly surfing on the web but what is really going on inside me is that I feel a terrible ache in my stomach). The next step is to stay with the experience of the uncomfortable sensations. This can sometimes feel like staying with a fire that is burning on the inside. I love the phrase Bruce Tift uses for this – embodied vulnerability. We actually stay with the uncomfortable sensations and soften to the experience. When we do this, we are beginning to accept every emotional experience as part of the flow of life.

In the final episode of the self-acceptance series, I asked Sounds True listeners to write to me at acceptance@soundstrue.com about the main lessons they learned from the series. To date, I have received dozens and dozens of letters about how life-changing the program has been for people. One of the main themes I have heard is how NORMALIZING it has been to hear renowned spiritual teachers and esteemed psychologists talk about their own struggles with self-acceptance (of course, I got personal in the interviews because that’s where so much of the action and learning comes from). Seeing the universality of the challenge helped people to be kinder to themselves. Yes, we can release ourselves from being hard on ourselves about being hard on ourselves!

As I said, I loved hosting this free series, and I encourage you to check it out.

SAP

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How Personal Writing Can Save Your Life

Christina Baldwin — June 4, 2013

Tami Simon speaks with Christina Baldwin, an author, educator, speaker, and retreat leader. Christina has authored several books on journal writing, including the classic Life Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice. With Sounds True, she has created the audio learning course Lifelines: How Personal Writing Can Save Your Life. In this episode, Tami speaks with Christina about her insights from five decades of journal writing from both a creative and spiritual perspective, including the physiological benefits of writing from an embodied perspective. Christina also shares several of her favorite practices for jump-starting and nourishing your own journal writing practice. (56 minutes)

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Your original face

Sounds True — May 29, 2013

There is a famous Zen koan that asks, “What is your original face, the face you had before you were born?”

Whenever I have heard this koan, my first response is, “I have no idea how to answer that.” And of course, that is the purpose of a Zen koan, to confound the thinking mind and in so doing, wake us up to a deeper form of knowing.

One thing I have noticed is that the more I am able to sit in that not knowing state, to rest in a sense of “just being”, the more I can relax and feel what, if anything, is needed next. It is not a conceptual process; it is more like a listening. And from that listening, originality emerges (“original” meaning “from the origin” or “from the source”).

Waking up is not about copying anyone or anything. It can’t be. Because as soon as we are mimicking something, we are recycling someone else’s experience. We are one step removed from the source; we are no longer rooted in our own moment-to-moment revelatory experience.

My basic point here is that the more we discover our own Original Face, the face we had before we were born, the more confident we become in expressing ourselves in unique ways. In a sense, great spiritual teachers feel to me like great “artists of the spirit.” And like an inspired musician, poet, or painter, a spiritual artist knows that he or she must spend time in the space of not knowing and then trust the melodies, visions, words, and guidance that come through.

Sometimes people say to me that they are afraid of spiritual awakening because they are afraid of being erased, afraid that they will turn into a paste of nothingness. What I have found is that the more we drop the sense of being separate and disconnected, the more we tune to the underlying, unifying “hum” of being, the more we become plugged in to a current that begins to animate our life. And sometimes, the life force expresses through us in pretty outrageous ways. We take chances. We speak from our heart. We become a mystery to ourselves and a creative force in the world.

To take this even further, what if the more we discover our Original Face, the more our one-and-only physical face starts to express the love and beauty of the cosmos in unusual and distinctive ways? Abraham Lincoln is attributed with saying “Every man over 40 is responsible for his face.” I take this to mean that each one of us has a responsibility for the love and kindness and warmth and openness that our face communicates. What if the quality in our eyes, the shape of our mouth, the openness of our forehead, and even the character of our nose, is a direct expression of our capacity to know and rest in being?

At Sounds True, we often refer to the Wake Up Festival as a celebration of the “many faces of awakening.” And I love that phrase. I look forward to seeing each and every person’s one and only original face this August in the Rocky Mountains.

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Search Results for: Sounds True – Page 139

The Hobo Code (for Spiritual Pilgrims)

Sera Beak: Red Hot and Holy, Part 2

Sera Beak: Red Hot and Holy, Part 1

The Self-Acceptance Project… wrap-up with Tami S...

How Personal Writing Can Save Your Life

Your original face

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