Amma

Place.

As I’ve pondered this word (today’s blog challenge prompt is ‘The best place’), I’ve thought of many places I love:

walking in Tilden Park (I live across the street from this wild heaven)

on the dance floor on Sunday mornings at 8:30 in Sausalito with 149 other sweaty and passionate 5Rhythms’ dancers

sitting on the floor in a puppy pile with my three grandchildren, 2 great-nieces and 1 great-nephew on Thanksgiving

doing yoga in my sister’s (the one and only Molly Fox) incredibly physical, and joyously lyrical yoga class

listening intently to my clients on our coaching calls as they share the most intimate details of their ‘one wild and precious life‘ (prostrations to Mary Oliver)

sitting in meditation with the most amazing teachers Lynn Barron, Amma and Adyashanti

simply being with Jeff, the man I share my life with.

I am struck by these things:

how crazy fortunate I am to be living the life I am living

and

how integral being in my body is to the ability to ‘be’ in any place and ‘know’ how it feels to be there. My body is my doorway to place, because I experience place through my senses. I drink place in with my eyes. I touch place with my heart. I feel place through the cells of my body.

and

The ‘best place’ to ‘be’ in is in this body, this sensuous female body that feels deepy and loves completely.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It hasn’t always been the best place to be. In fact, for many years I wanted nothing to do with this place. I stayed way up in my head, or at times, was nowhere to be found even in the vicinity my body.

Now, after much ‘work’ and lots of great body practices, I know differently. This female body is divine. Not just mine. All female bodies are divine.

I remember being at and Adyashanti retreat when he was speaking about the divine nature of all of life. As I listened, I had an epiphanic experience (fancy way of saying an ephiphany, because I love the word ep⋅i⋅phan⋅ic). I suddenly knew, in the embodied way, that my female body, and all female bodies, are divine. We bring life into life in a myriad of forms. Our female bodies are gateways to this amazing thing we call life. If we are in our bodies, we feel deeply, we connect with the earth.

As this was satsang, when the time came for people to share experiences or ask questions, I raised my hand, was called upon, strode up to the mic, and said, loudly and clearly, “I just got that this body (pointing to mine) is divine”. I suddenly heard a chorus of female gasps arise around the room. I obviously wasn’t the only one who had missed this message growing up.

So in wondering about place, I now see, and taste and touch and hear and feel, that body needs to be in conscious relationship with place, any place, to know it.

As Mary Oliver writes,

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

This post is part of Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge
Day 11: The best place. A coffee shop? A pub? A retreat center? A cubicle? A nook? A BODY!

Image credit: Place of Healing, by Mara on Flickr

Blue Tara ~ Goddess of Liberation

“Blue Tara, or Ekajati, is associated with the transmutation of anger. A Protector expressing ferocious, wrathful, female energy who destroys all learning obstacles producing good luck and swift spiritual awakening. She removes fear of enemies, spreading joy and good fortune.” (source: Seasonal Salon)

If I am going to be unabashedly female, I must be present to what is here. Anger is here…again. To be honest, I don’t know what to do with this anger. Anger wasn’t something I learned to feel or express, but it certainly is here.

Anger for the way women and children are treated. I sense rage underneath a pretty veneer of good and appropriate behavior, not only on my part, but in the world at large. I sense many women feel this rage at something we can’t quite name, or perhaps don’t know how to name. I am sure many men feel this, too. I know some of it is my own anger, while I know much of it is the collective rage, a rage carried over from centuries of oppression of the Feminine.

My mind can’t understand how this anger and rage can be expressed without hurting another. I don’t want to simply spew more negativity into the world…there is enough already. But, I know I must feel this anger. It is here. And, I feel compelled to do something about what is happening all over our planet. While I feel small compared to the problems, when I feel this anger arise, there is at least something moving, something stirring rather than the complacency that comes when I feel overwhelmed by the problems I see.

In my writing, I have been stymied by the anger that comes up. I am clear that I don’t want to blame or rant or rave. I want to move from the love I know lies deep within my heart. Yet, I don’t yet know the fullness of how love can show up, the ways in which it can move and stand in its fullness as the truth.

I do know that love can cut like a knife of truth. I have seen it. When I stayed at Amma’s ashram in India, I witnessed Her love over and over. Even in moments of Darshan, when she was hugging someone with infinite tenderness of the Mother, she would occasionally express this knife of truth (what I might call anger or something like it) towards someone when it arose. But, here the expression was clean. It cut through the haze of ego like a knife, cleanly without a lingering trace of guilt or blame. Her love flowed through the entire experience. Witnessing its expression took my breath away. I had never seen the beauty in truth of expression like this before.

From my own experience, I know that pure love follows the true expression of anger. When anger is experience fully, without identifying with it, and without allowing one’s conditioning to feed off of it, it transforms into love.

I now know this transmutation of anger to love is what Blue Tara represents. For thousands of years, Blue Tara, and the other goddess forms, have represented this transmutation because anger blocks the way to expression of truth and love. There have been deities to express this because this is part of our path to awakening, to discovering the truth and wholeness of what it is to be female.

There is so much fear amongst women about being angry. No woman wants to be the angry bitch. Yet, we must feel the entirety of what is here, without identifying with it. We are not our feelings or thoughts, yet they move through us. When we block the negative ones, we block all of them. Our hearts are big enough to hold the entire universe…I know we can hold the feeling and expression of this anger, too. Perhaps then it will be like letting the air out of a balloon, slowly, little by little, rather than letting it get so full that it pops.