When I spoke to Ram Dass I came away with one overriding understanding and that is to follow my heart. My heart will lead me because it encompasses the head and not the other way around. The head can announce the vision once the heart decides, but if the head announces a visionary direction and the heart is not in it nothing will come of it. My heart is in the place of healing. I can actively involve my entire being into healing myself or the effort is unfulfilling and unsuccessful. The heart must become committed.
When I learned of the Shamatha Project my heart was committed and the head saw the way to go and everything that I did was designed to get me into the project. I went to every retreat that Alan taught within a reachable distance of my home from Hawaii to Mexico City to Montana to California in different locations and Shambala center in CO. If Alan taught shamatha I was there. I went to retreats in New Mexico at Upaya Zen center with Natalie Goldberg to learn to write. Believing that I would be writing reports about what I was doing I felt that it would be wise for me to write as well as I could so that what was written would be read and used by the people studying the material. I went to other retreats done by other teachers such a Yinguer Rinpoche on the subject of Shamatha looking for a way to better the practice that I had. I attended work shops with fellow associates of Alan to get different perspectives on how this should be approached. Everything is designed to get me conversant and into the Shamatha Project. Whenever there was anything that was official for getting signed in I was always among the first to have the papers filled in and turned in. I met everyone I could associated with the project. Going to DC to attended the Mind and LIfe gathering to meet anyone I could who was associated with the project or anything ancillary to the project. I took courses in dream and sleep yoga since they were relative to the basic stages of shamatha. I exercised rigorously to get in shape for being at the retreat. All of the major efforts that I had in my life were centered around getting into project.
It worked . The gods smiled upon me and allowed me to do this most important project . I was somewhat disappointed that I was not in the study group but rather the control group but that ultimately turned out to be for the better since I was in the group that actually was a little more prepared for than the first group. Now I am in the process of healing my soul and body. The body which has this aggressive disease has to be attended to with the utmost care and preexistence and love. The soul is the vehicle. The soul for me is the vehicle of the heart. It is the way that my heart will express itself in caring for this body, my life ,my work, my prima amiga, and everything that is worth living for.
The goal is to heal, the method is to learn that I already am healed and how to express that.
I went to the Oasis of Healing this morning and received a very warm welcome and support from staff which I got to talk to. My initial contact was with a woman who was a patient. A lady in her thirties with teenaged children who she was trying to manage with a blackberry by sending text messages . With that she was only partially successful, however she had come to the center in Sept with cancer in the bones and in the lymph and had gotten the results of her tests recently to discover that she was almost completely free of the disease. It was most heartening and uplifting.
I then toured the facility with another lovely lady who brought me into the facilities of the nutritionist and the other people in the process and it was something that I definitely am going to have to consider. They have a process called IBT in which they give chemotherapy to a patient after having them fast and then have an transfusion of insulin. At the most propitious moment they give an injection of glucose and chemo which in theory leads to the cancer cells which are starved for sugar ingesting large amounts of chemo while minimizing the dosages of the poison.
Sounds very promising. Doing my research.
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