Art of God

I had a session with Brooks today. It was about relationship, about how to remain who I am, and how to connect. I was cleaning something, some trauma, from my body. As I opened more and more I started realizing that the body is all I need.

Did you ever feel that it's all well and good to "loose the mind" when in class with Brooks, but once the class is over and its time to go back to work, the mind is very much needed? How could we function without it? How would we know what to do? How would we find points of reference?

Continue reading "The body is all we need" »

I got something that I really, really wanted today. I was hoping for it, waiting for it, scheming to get it for nearly a year now - and today I finally got it. And I felt pretty bad about it.

This "something" is a garage attached to my house. It's been converted into a separate studio and rented out to someone else, before my husband and I moved in. We really wanted the garage, we really needed the additional space for Christopher's office, we really got increasingly crowded working together in one, none too large, room.

I couldn't do anything to get it, it was the landlords decision and I didn't want to do anything behind the back of the person who was renting it, a very nice person, but I sure did a lot in my head. I was scheming and plotting and imagining all kinds of stuff.

Continue reading "Be careful what you wish for" »

I had an epiphany last night. After years of working with Brooks, after graduating from his program, after countless private sessions, after all the years I spent on sitting in zazen before I met Brooks, I finally got the most basic, most fundamental, most obvious really, lesson that Brooks teaches. Talk about slow learners!

Continue reading "To merge or not to merge" »

I received a comment on my post about changing the world. The post stated, more or less, that modifying the system might not be the answer, rather we can simply decide to not be controlled by it. The comment said: "You must be massively rich and do not have to work with any "little" people; one cannot get much freer than that!"

I thought about this for quite a while. I considered it. I looked at my life. It wasn't an act of thinking as much as letting the thoughts flow and whirl in my mind, hoping something will emerge. Here is what emerged:

Continue reading "Money doesn't get to have a say" »

I have been married for nearly 8 years now, and for most of those years I was trying to find out why. Why was I married? If I remove the need factor, the fear of life factor, the need to be supported factor, the need to be safe, protected, taken care of, as well as the need to be a mother, then what is left?

If I am God, complete and unique, fully responsible for my own reality, perfectly autonomous and independent - then what do I need a husband for?

I have a friend who is in a serious amount or marriage-trouble. She and her husband are so deeply in conflict that they can hardly open their mouth in the same room without starting a fight. There is so much resentment, anger and pain between them that it seems absolutely irreparable. It seems that all they can do to save their sanity is to run away from each other as soon as possible.

Continue reading "What do I need a husband for?" »

Observing different realities is what I've been doing a lot lately. As I'm thinking about my book, working on what it is I want to say exactly, thinking through all my ideas and concepts, it seems that everything comes down to knowing who we are? Another way to say the same thing is: knowing what reality we are creating? What we are doing, how we act, what we want, I believe is all a result of who we believe we are and what we believe reality is like.

I know what Sarah Palin's reality is like, for example. She expressed it in her acceptance speech. She said: "Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay (...) Al-Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America (...) This world of threats and dangers is not just a community, and it doesn't just need an organizer." What a terrible place to live in, I thought as I listened to her speech. What a scary, dangerous space the reality must be if this is how she sees it.

Continue reading "Who gets to say?" »

I finally started working on my book. It's been a while since I first came up with the idea, about a year and a half actually.

I have realized recently that I have enough material from all the blog posts I've written over last several months to put it all together and produce one comprehensive story.

Full of excitement and eagerness I sat down to my computer only to find that writing a book is quite a different story from writing on the blog.

Continue reading "Inspiration on Demand" »

I just got back from my session with Brooks. It is customary for me to feel like I just got put through a very intense cycle of washing, drying and ironing after my sessions with Brooks. Today there is an extra intensity to this particular set of sensations, today I feel like I need to die and get born again ... become a born again Pausha :)

I feel that there is a new element to my growing process, and that is actually putting what I learned and what I became into practice. At some point I said to Brooks: I am a "closet God". I am who I am inside, but outside I am whatever I was trained to be. Whatever I believe is safe to be. Whatever I think people will want me to be.

Continue reading "Born Again Pausha" »

I find more and more pleasure in the company of trees. Ojai, the place where I live, is something of a village, though it is called a town. Nature here is very powerfully present and I get to hang out with it every day. Every day I notice the presence of trees more strongly and distinctly, their personality, their energy is more palpable than that of many human beings I know.

As I walked my dog the other day, down a deserted street lined with beautiful old oaks, I felt like I was walking down a crowded street and I realized that the presence of those oaks is so strong because they are so strongly present. They are so very much themselves.

Continue reading "Who are you?" »

Is there a God or isn't there? Is there a God because billions of people believe in him or is there a God because no one can prove that there isn't? Or maybe there is no God, because no one was able to prove that there is one?

Christopher is reading a book on this very subject at the moment and once in a while treats me to little excerpts. As I listen to them what comes to my mind, every time, is an excerpt from one of my favorite books: "the Master and the Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov.

It would be to long a quote, so I'll summarize it: one hot summer evening in Moscow a poet and an editor sit on a park bench talking about Jesus. The story happens in fifties, the very middle of deep communism, which of course denied that any such "opium for the masses" as the stories about God could actually be true.

Continue reading "The Ultimate Truth" »