As I sit and start writing this first blog for a while, I connect with the memory of how I started my blogging career “like this” – a savoured moment sat in the corner of a cafe. Twenty years ago, I was writing about cycling and coaching. The coffee companion remains, this Helen still cycles, but little else is the same…including the geography of my life.
Since my last post I have relocated from Eastbourne, my home for 32 years, to nearby Lewes. What with the move and navigating the upheaval coming with my Dad’s poor health, these past 8 weeks have been perhaps the most challenging of my (blessed) life. Helen the Cyclist 20 years ago would not have been equipped in the way I find myself now: my therapeutic understanding, the lens of the enneagram, my practice as a Vajrayana Buddhist. These paths have allowed me (not always perfectly) to sit in the eye of the storm and on the whole not get sucked in by the vortex around me. My wife and I agree – these 8 weeks have felt like the final crescendo of a tough year. The challenge of making a decision to drastically change our life and having to wait to enact the plan. Just when the Housing Gods deemed us worthy, life threw the curve ball it is always going to throw: once there is birth, there follows aging, sickness, and death. Dad had a close call, and this has taught me much. He is about to return home, over two months after his life saving operation.
The Buddhist teachings explain we are always in bardo, transition. These eight weeks have been like crossing a threshold, and I feel the initiation. There is the grief and heartbreak of all gone and nearly lost: the house we loved, only the second town I have called “home” in my life, and the re-adjustment of Dad not dying and yet the Dad I knew HAS gone; and holding all of this in tension with the excitement and possibility of all to come.
In the conversations with various mentors this past week, I have spoken about that very question “what next?”. Easter as the festival of rebirth, renewal and transfiguration could not be more timely! I have settled in my new town, my new home very quickly. Unpacking my books and arranging my office was completed within 48 hours of getting the keys! Co-emergence tells us confusion and wisdom always accompany one another – and for sure, my efficiency of settling was both a neurotic speediness I know in myself AND an inner wisdom that knew this was a nesting process to find ground. Using the metaphor of meditation, this nesting has been akin to establishing the sitting posture. I close my eyes, I settle into my seat bones, feel the strength of the back and soft open chest…I feel ground. I bring awareness to that experience, and from this ground I can open my eyes and raise the gaze.
What next then?
The most obvious place I turned first has been my practice life. It is nearly a year since I attended the abhisheka in Canada to receive my yidam practice of Vajrayogini. Like most of the teachings and practices of the Vajrayana Buddhist path, I cannot reveal too much*; but if I may use some Jungian language, Vajrayogini is the daimon (like Jung’s Philemon) with whom I will strike up a relationship and explore the outer and inner reaches of mind – not just my particular mind, but mind in its vast sense…or psyche. I have not been ready to start this practice and deliberately put my practice life if not on a back burner, a side burner. Well, that is what I told myself and others…and yet these past 8 weeks have shown how powerfully my practice path thus far has permeated my everyday: to not just be a witness to the storm, but to sit right inside it and BE the eye. Vajrayogini is going to stoke up that storm, I have no doubt…and like the sky dancer she is, she will help me learn the steps and burn them into my bodymind. After readying myself through a conversation with my therapist, a Buddhist Jungian himself, I am nervously excited about “courting” her.
The next “what next” dialogue somewhat surprised me; as it came from a desire to NOT talk about client work in supervision. The conversation became an opportunity to speak more generally about my practice as therapist but more so about my practice as a supervisor of other therapists. As I move across a ‘sage-ing’ arc (that starts with maiden for the female psyche and moves onto mother and then crone), I feel more ready to step into the mentor role myself and I love how being a supervisor allows me to entertain that beloved synergy of theory and practice, of a bodymind not separate AND, helping others too find their ground in that embodied view. With my own supervisor I was able to carve out some intentions for my practice across my private practice, my teaching, and my writing. No doubt this is why a morning writing a blog post in a local cafe felt so exciting today…a chance to re-ignite my writing rituals and bring back into focus my book writing project (which I intend to bring back centre stage this summer…there you go, I have said it out loud, a public commitment made!)
Here above, I have shared two domains in which I have considered “what next”, and yet of course these two whilst not the same are not different either. The non-dual path (which includes Vajrayana Buddhism) does not “this” and “that”. And just like the last 8 weeks have facilitated, life for Helen is a weave of “both / and”: the principles and intention remains whatever I am doing and with whom. It is perhaps not surprising then when extending my “what next?” to my reading….the obvious book to select was Mirabai Starr’s Ordinary Mysticism. As well as being an advocate of the divine feminine, Starr is a translator of the great mystics; a group of people I have become enchanted with since realising the Vajrayana has more in common with alchemy and mysticism than Buddhism. Starr’s book is a practical encouragement to live out the view of the Vajrayana – to weave the magic and mundane, to see the sacred in the ordinary.
Speaking to the kind of experiences I have navigated through these past 8 weeks, Starr invites…
When I started out on the early steps as a Buddhist (secretly) I was hoping I would transcend all my pain by taking on a spiritual path. This flight is not uncommon, yet some 15 years later, I now have faith that the healing work is to turn back into the suffering and burn off “what needs to die” (again, Vajrayogini will be my trusted muse) ** The Vajrayana view and practices in particular help me see more clearly how I reach “over there” (e.g. putting up book shelves to establish certainty and security) and yet simultaneously, the okayness I seek is already here.
Again, “notice a luminescence just behind the dense blackness, like the moon softening the edges of a snowy night” pg 18.
Another way to put it, to be the ocean and experience the waves; to feel into the speed that brings the painful neck I currently carry (as a result of speedy unpacking!) AND the backdrop of luminous awareness that remains untainted by the speed. That last bit might get a bit esoteric, but using Starr’s language – there is a quality of knowing that is the light that shines and lets us know the dark more vividly. Shift allegiance to this knowing, away from what is known.
I am adopting this book to support seeing the sacred in all I do: that yes, while I will be devoting more concentrated time to formal “practice” through engaging with the Vajrayogini liturgy, “practice” is no different in life itself. Notice the luminescence in whatever I am doing in that moment…when with a client, when facilitating a workshop, when having a glass of red wine on the decking, even when putting the bins out! To even say “what next” is misleading, as the next moment is no different to the now, nor different to the past 8 weeks, to the past year. Luminescence always has been, always will be; there is no on / off.
What has changed is the renewed intention.
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* The Vajrayana is secret because its only realizeable within your mind. Its hidden because it shouldn’t be taught to those that aren’t a suitable vessel…that is the work of the first two yanas, the hinayana and mahayana.
** Another way of putting this is to consider the mystical path as the “both / and” of spirit and the more earthy soul.