A Guru in the Guest Room {Review}

Posted on May 15, 2012 by

Spiritual Truths Delivered with Comedic Timing

This funny book is about love.

Not romantic love or even sentimental love, but about the bottomless true love that is here always when we stop paddling around on the surface of ourselves and instead dive to the depths of Self.

Few swimmers will ever stop to notice the deeps of true nature, content to splash around in the unreal. But sometimes life tosses us a cement life raft, a sinker that will drown us to save us. In that case, we get to plumb the love we are by sinking on the heavy weight sufferings of grief, anger and desolation.

Vicki Woodyard, who lost a child and a husband to cancer, knows well that loss and loneliness not only break the heart, but also break it open.

In Guru in the Guest Room, Woodyard conjures an imaginary friend named Swami Z—a tough love teacher with a wacky sense of humor and a short, balding, bed-sheet wearing appearance. Over several chapters, as Swami Z bakes cookies in the author’s kitchen and holds make-believe backyard satsangs to a host of colorful characters, we begin to see that this two dimensional creation is coming to embody multi-dimensional truth delivered in clever one-liners.

Indeed, the blurry line between what is real and unreal is the very lesson that ripens from this conjuring of a swami who exists in the imagination of our writer, yet who clearly knows more than the writer knows she knows.

“The mystery of Swami is he doesn’t exist. No matter how hard I try, I cannot bring him to physical life. And yet he is a miracle worker. He has changed my life for the better and has taught me how to beg for self mercy until it hurts.”

This is not a plot-driven read, but rather a meander through a comedic, often wise and more often poignant teaching. There are lines to die for, like this one, “I never second guess love. That would be tantamount to breaking an egg before it is laid.”

Or this discourse, when Larry asks Swami, “If god is here and now, why aren’t we any different?” And Swami replies, “Because you are not here and now, you are here and then.”

The seekers that populate these fictional satsangs reflect back the awkward, broken and eternally hopeful in all of us.

There’s Larry, who lives in a trailer and rides a stick pony named Ruin (a pony who is rumored to be the real guru). Rose is forever digging in her purse or blowing her nose. And polyester clad Jim asks all the annoying questions. Larry rubs Vicki the wrong way through out, sparking her jealousy that he gets all of Swami Z’s attention to her conviction that this fellow with a greasy haired mullet and big pores is simply a loser.

Refreshingly, Woodyard writes her own character, Vicki, as 360-degree human, replete with a mean streak, a depressive side and brutal self doubt along side a relentless desire to love herself more and to surrender to inner peace. As Vicki confesses, “So Swami Z is nothing but a figment of my imagination and when I let Vicki be in the script I began to love her too. In fact that is the direct path to love for me. Loving the script and the characters.”

Vicki has a question that has been growing in the back of her mind for years, that near the books end she finally brings to Swami Z. “Will there ever be an end to this longing for love, this fear of losing love, this hope of winning love as yet unseen?”

“Let me tell you something that may surprise you,” said Swami Z deftly flipping a cobweb from the corner with his spatula.

“When you can contain the whole world inside your heart, they will never forget you, impossible. They will be unable to not love you. You will not have to beg for the leavings of love. You will have the recipe for love itself.”

Ultimately, this book’s main spiritual discourse is a non-dual take on the unreal nature of self (“I hope none of you are taking Swami literally, that is to miss the essence of the teachings, which is your unreality”).

But a strong subtext is about the frailty and resilience of the human heart, written from the depths of a writer who has loved deeply and lost profoundly. Her self-confessed abandonment fears come up again and again as she wonders if Swami Z will just leave her one day.

And then there is the one question that redlines through the narrative—how do we love wholeheartedly when inevitably we will be left alone?

I’ll let the characters answer that one.

~

Vicki’s book is available on kindle and paperback at Amazon.

(this review was first published in elephant journal).

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The Carnal Elephant in the Satsang Room

Posted on May 5, 2012 by

Photo: Julica da Costa

A reader asked me the other day about my sex life post-awakening and whether it had changed (Answer: yes, drastically and yet, not at all).  During the same time I got wind of an upcoming teleseminar series with interviews of well known spiritual teachers about their vulnerabilities and challenges.  A kind of get real endeavor to bring the human angle back to the storyline of enlightenment.  I suggested the series host, Raphael Cushnir, also ask about their sex life and he responded, “In the series I had a great conversation about the role of teaching and sexuality with Diane Musho Hamilton. Not the full Monty on this vast topic, but definitely some powerful sharing.”

And I realized the full Monty scares people. Why don’t people put up their hands in satsang and ask the likes of Adyashanti or Ganga-gi about the role of sexuality in awakening? And why don’t these teachers address their own sexual story with the zeal they have for the tale of their enlightenment? It doesn’t matter we are on a path to self realization, somehow bringing into the open our own sexuality–in its full glory and despair– is still taboo. Facebook will shut you down if you over-sex your posts, and God forbid you language with words like cunt or cock or fuck. We are programmed to fear sexual vulnerability and forbidden to express our sexuality outside the lines of socially acceptable detail. We want our public sex talk in soft focus, blurry on the edges and generalized into normalcy. We want to keep our hands over our ears and hear no evil, as if sexual pleasure is a dirty secret instead of a potential portal to divinity.

As some of you know, in March I joined elephant journal as a regular columnist, writing on Love, Sex and Relationship. My last post, The Dark Secret Reason Relationships Fail (which intimately addresses my own sexual fears), soared to 11,000 views in one week. The piece was written a year ago, before my awakening, but the story of my sex life has been one where sexuality (from bisexuality to tantra classes) was a significant part of the sacred path up the mountain. To pretend that sex was and is irrelevant would be impossible.

My colleague at elephant, Candice Holdorf, recently blogged in exquisite and excruciating detail of her experience of being “fucked open by the universe.” In a piece entitled Sex: Not for the Faint of Heart, she shares her experience (one which I have also had) of the transcendent yet fully carnal place where the boundless dissolves all boundaries. She writes, “Whereas before I was simply feeling my own body, I was now feeling my own body through the tip of his cock, which he was feeling (obviously). And I could feel him feeling his cock and feeling me with his cock. So it’s as if there was a circuit of connection—from me, to his cock, to his mind, back to his cock, and to me again—that added a whole new dimension of sensation to the experience. I wasn’t only in my orgasm, I was also in his orgasm, which then melded and becomes the shared orgasm. It’s as if one plus one did not equal two, but infinity.”

I’m in peri-menopause now. Things are changing. It’s a whole new experience of this body (more dry, less open, more contained, less desirous) and I’m in a state of being (less thought, more presence) where the change is not judged or resisted. It simply is.

Yet I am also in a relationship with a virile man who just might have a voracious libido and who certainly sees sexuality as his doorway to infinity. So stay tuned and watch for my new blog, Love Stripped Down, where the topic of sex and enlightenment will be explored in depth. And of course, at elephant where the backstory is still unwinding, in my tell-all tales of how my true and false ideas about sex were an integral part of waking up.

Awareness is here (and still sexual)

Lori Ann

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Tuned to Channel Cosmic Professor

Posted on April 27, 2012 by

And now, for something completely different.

Over my years as a writer, every now and then I found myself consumed by the urge to take dictation from a voice in my head that did not sound like me. The cadence, language and tone was not my normal wry humor mixed with splashy adjectives and high strung verbs. Instead, the voice would come across in my inner ear sounding a lot like a humorless professor in semi-poetic lecture mode. But I took notes, because the content was inevitably fascinating and oddly insightful material on the nature of consciousness and reality.

The last time I tuned into Channel Cosmic Professor was in the months before 9-11 and my mother’s sudden death, in which the voice (self-identified as The Teacher) spoke an hour a day for three months on the nature of Creation and Choice (a handwritten manuscript that I will likely take to the grave). And perhaps to really get my attention, the day before my mother was killed The Teacher said (and I wrote): “Someone close to you is about to die suddenly.” When I probed for details, the voice was annoyingly cryptic: “Some things are not meant to be known.” The next day my mother died under the wheels of a Ford 250 pick up truck.

Ever since the awakening that turned my identity inside out, my inner landscape has been silent and hugely present. There is little noise, other than stray thoughts about food, comfort and sleep (boy am I tired or hungry, or this chair is too hard). When the silence of true nature comes to the foreground, any high verbiage thought sounds like a megaphone blast. Imagine the sonic boom then, of hearing the Cosmic Professor in my head again all of the sudden. Class in session. Please take notes.

So, in the name of sharing this odd journey of my awakening to true nature, here is what the Cosmic Professor had to say. It might speak to you, or it might sound like new age drivel. But I just took notes, so if you have a complaint, take it to the dean.

The Power of Totality

What you receive is what you are. You are that which both gives and takes. When this totality is realized, there is no struggle to get. For how can you get that which is yours to give all along?

You imagine yourself a part of the whole. But I tell you, you are the whole. There is no other. As the whole, no parts are missing. You cannot add to your totality, nor can it ever be diminished.

What power then have you? The power to create within that totality, new patterns. The power to re-constellate that which is here, into ever more beautiful arrangements.

The totality you are is a flower garden from which you may create unique blossoming bouquets. The wholeness is water that crystalizes an original snowflake every time.

You are that originality, whole yet separate in form. You contain the infinite within your finite expression. There is nothing you do not have at your disposal as cosmic artists rendering the face of God in one-of-a-kind manifestations.

To misunderstand your totality is to lose the power invested in you, by you. Remember that which you are and from there, paint the sky with your heart.

Awareness is here, (the professor too)

Lori Ann

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My Lover, My Muse

Posted on April 15, 2012 by

Photo: Bryan Brenneman

I remember a time when sitting down to write was a chore. It didn’t matter that writing is my profession of choice, and that I’d spent years eagerly refining compelling lead sentences at newspapers and magazines. Or that I had several unpublished labors of love-hate, full-length book manuscripts that had at one time swept me up in a fevered creative ordeal. All of it had the flavor of marathon running, a sort of gritty commitment to see something through to a punishing finish line.

Then one day six months ago, my relationship to writing changed. Now, without warning, I’ve become a sprinter, a muse-driven chariot of wordsmithing, a glorious language slut and a consort to a tell-all demon, a confessional urge that insists on going intimately public in blogs, books and radio shows. If I knew enlightenment meant inviting the world into every nook and cranny of my heart, I might have hesitated. As it stands, it’s a bit too late to say no thank you the reportorial word river that flows through me—that would be tantamount to erecting a beaver dam to slow down Niagra Falls.

This post is short and sweet. I just want you to know I’m burning up in the inferno of creative flow. And instead of fortifying this personality, soldifying it into a “writer” I am being cindered. There is so little of me left some days, when the writing is done, I drift like ash through the world, airborne and light.

This feeling of disappearing used to happen only when I wrote poetry. Then, I would open up like a fully dilated cervix to allow the birthing of a poem. Now, everyday I am a fully open faucet for the torrent of words. Poems, blogs, books and more, are pouring out of me, not-me.

And this is my lover, this muse of words. He whispers softly into my ear as I drift to sleep at night and then slips into my dreams and seeds me with inspiration and ideas. By day, he takes me with great force, binding me to my desk and riding me hard. I’m alive to his touch, awake to his urging, fully penetrated by this daimon that would have me shatter to bits any idea that I can hide from my reader the story he tells. I am the dictation taker, yielding to the voice that proclaims itself heard. I am nothing but the empty space into which his words write themselves.

The other day a friend lamented that in his post-awakening life, he was drifting without clear purpose. A professional photographer for years, he now felt no passion for his craft. My advice to him was in the form of a simple Rumi quote: “Let the beauty of what you love be what you do. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth.”

I am kissing the earth with written words, kneeling before my lover-muse for as long as he will have me. Awakening has left me free and fearless to bow before my own destiny.

I’m wondering: How do you kiss the earth with what you love to do?

Awareness is here, (and plugging my latest muse-driven piece at elephant journal, Are Weapons of Mass Distraction Keeping You from Inner Peace?)

Lori Ann

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Bending the Reality Spoon

Posted on March 30, 2012 by

I was nine years old when my first miracle happened. It was June, and a school field trip to the zoo was about to be cancelled in light of a monsoon-like morning.  The torrential rain was forecast to continue well into the next day. I’d been looking forward to this outing for weeks and, like any good Aries, wasn’t going to take this lousy weather lying down. Home for lunch, I headed to the living room, pressed my hands together, knelt down and whispered. “Dear God, please stop the rain.”

You can guess where this tale is going—as soon as I returned to the kitchen, my mother (who had been washing dishes at the sink) declared she had just witnessed a glimpse of blue sky through the window. It was still pouring hard but by the time I finished eating and returned to my class, the day had transformed into a hot sunny afternoon. And yes, the field trip was on.

Looking back, I realize I made this petition to a diety of weather management from beginner’s mind. I wasn’t raised to believe in God, but had heard from my devout grade five teacher that Jesus was a miracle worker and prayers were meant to be answered. I simply believed him. This direct and immediate response to my request for a sunny day would become the spring board for a life of questing for the miraculous. And a life of wondering why sometimes the divine seemed to be on-call for my requests and other times, missing-in-action entirely. At age nine, the mystic in me was born and along with it, the seeker.

I realize now that one of the primary drives of any spiritual seeker is to swap ordinary reality for an array of non-ordinary experiences. In my case, these looked like kundalini risings , sexual tantra and drum-induced shamanic trances. For other seekers, it can involve reality altering substances like Ayahuasca, psychedelic mushrooms and mescaline, plant medicines that open doors of perception. And then there is the whole metaphysical angle where what is sought is extraordinary phenomena, from psychic surgery to hands-on healings to reliable predictions of the future. Simply, there is a deep yearning to trade in the mundane for the numinous, to abandon the everyday for a wild ride on the mystical side.

But the catch is that the capacity to engage the miraculous, when sought from the vantage point of our separate self, often remains stubbornly unfound. Sure, we might have hit or miss moments with our Super Normal Powers (what the Hindu’s call Siddhis), but the full blossoming of these abilities perhaps requires first the emptying out of the self that would misuse them.

In waking up from the dream of being a separate self, I often used the word “emptiness” to describe the sense of being a borderless vastness. Now, it’s clear that I called it emptiness because what had spilled out was the individual mind, leaving this boundless container that one could name God, Presence or even Awareness.  The name we give our true nature is not nearly as important as the recognition we are the very thing we seek—we are the miraculous. It’s not out there. It’s in here.

In the film the Matrix, there is a scene where a boy under the tutelage of the Oracle, bends a spoon without touching it, while Neo, our hero, watches.

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Spoon boy: There is no spoon.

Neo: There is no spoon?

Spoon boy: Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

The teaching here is crystal clear: We access the miraculous when we remember our true nature is the very stuff of reality. We are the script writer, director and actor in this grand play of life. And if we want to walk on water, we simply need to know we are both the walker and the water. When this unity is apparent, then miracles become ordinary and the ordinary, miraculous.

Awareness is here, (levitating soon in a theatre near you, and most recently, talking with Christian clergy about miracles and awakening on the Way of Consciousness radio show )

Lori Ann

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Five Things My Dog Taught Me About God

Posted on March 16, 2012 by

I have a pet theory, no pun intended, that God is really a dog. Forget a bearded fellow on a throne, a crafty one-eyed Odin, or any number of fierce sword or skull wielding goddesses. Even forget softies like compassionate Kwan Yin or hearth-tending Hestia. God has four legs—meaning any anthropomorphic diety clearly is two legs shy of perfection.

How do I know God is a dog? Well, dogs have always taught me more about divine nature than any Sunday school program or ancient wisdom text. And I figure if God is going to reveal itself to mortals, it’s going to be cleverly. What smarter way to blend in amongst us than as man’s best friend? I mean, angels are a rarified breed who make fleeting cameos and never stay as houseguests. But dogs have insinuated themselves into our yards, homes, and let’s face it, beds. Yes, God walks and sleeps among us on all four legs.

So, here are five things God, disguised as my dog, taught me about True Nature. (By that, I mean the stuff I am made of, God is made of, and you are too).

God is a Player.  I’m not saying God is a womanizer (that would be a play-a) but rather God has a fondness for frolicking fun. Chasing the ball is the tip of the good-times iceberg. Tag with other dogs or endless hours in delight at making the squeaky toy squeak, all point to True Nature being insanely playful.  As Osho says, “The moment you start seeing life as non-serious, a playfulness, all the burden on your heart disappears.” Bottom line: Dogs are here to remind us that “all work and no play” is a surefire recipe for a heavy heart and a sign you have forgotten you are play incarnate.

God is Curious. As a kid, my favorite book series was about a curious monkey named George. But it wasn’t until I got my first puppy that I realized monkeys have nothing on dogs when it comes to the relentless desire to investigate—what’s under the rug, the flower bed, the bed covers. Ever watch your dog’s face when you are acting strange? That tilted-to-side head as your canine tries to figure out WTF are you doing? No way you are going to be ignored while wailing in grief or whooping in joy. Your dog is perpetually curious, about you and the world.  You, as true nature, are also curious about this odd creature called (fill in your name) and the apparent material world it inhabits. True Nature, like your dog, knows it’s a soul having a body-centered experience, not a body having a soulful one.

God is Forgiving.  You only have to screw up badly with your dog once, to know this creature has a built-in forgiveness drive. We are not talking abuse, that creates a fearful and helpless animal (and even then, dogs are willing to remain loyal).  I’m talking mistakes, like letting my puppy sit in the front seat of the car and then (after screeching to a halt to avoid that other car) having to pick up the whimpering fur ball from the floor. Or the time I left the carnations on the coffee table (dog poison alert) and my dog spent the next day vomiting red petals. Or even the time I ranted hysterically about the umpteenth pee puddle that day, sending the puppy into hiding beneath the bed. Despite all my bad behavior, my dog refuses to stop licking my face and loving me. God is like this. You heard the cliché, but it’s true: God, like your dog, loves unconditionally.

God is Protective. Yes, you heard me right. God is a lot like a ‘good shepherd’ and guard dog rolled into one, noble and vigilant in watching over us. Where a dog will sacrifice its life to save us from a rampaging bear, God will also step in to save us from ourselves. This salvage has been called “salvation” and involves the rescue of our divine nature from the illusion we are mortal. Enlightenment is simply the waking up from the dream of mind, the dream that says I am separate and I am solo. Like a watch dog that keeps intruders at bay, God keeps scaring off the mistaken beliefs that anchor us in a false reality. By the way, God barks a lot like a mastiff, in basso profondo. None of that yippy, high-strung, small-dog stuff.

God is Evolving. If your eyebrows raise at this revelation, just relax into the possibility that the eternal, unborn, unchanging Self is also exploring the impulse to grow and change. Dogs as a species point to this – from wolf ancestry, canines have mutated into a huge array of domestic helpmates, in all shapes and sizes. Shepherds, bird dogs, guard dogs, lap dogs are just some of the permutations that god has explored in her manifestation as dog. Granted, we have shaped the trajectory of the species, just as God is surely shaping the trajectory of humankind.  Andrew Cohen, in his book Evolutionary Enlightenment, has the same idea. He says,  “God is always desperate to grow. God is infinite in the unmanifest realm. But in the manifest realm God is not infinite—God can only know him or herself to the extent to which conscious beings are actually able to awaken to their own absolute nature.” In other words, we are infinity playing in the land of the finite and learning about our Self through growth and change.

Since I woke up from my dream self five months ago, life has unfolded with an unparalleled freshness, wonderment and innocence that I’ve imagined is a lot like being a two year old for whom the world is so brand new. If I feel like a toddler, then what about dogs, who are really God? In 2009 researchers determined that according to several behavioral measures, dogs’ mental abilities are close to a human child age 2 to 2.5 years. God is a dog. I rest my case without even having to spell God backwards.

Awareness is Here (woof!)

Lori Ann

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Death of the Narrator

Posted on March 3, 2012 by

Do you ever stop to listen to your thoughts? If you do, you’ll notice that other than occasional functional, creative or investigative thought, the thinking mind has three full time jobs: It reflects on the past, it projects the future or it comments on the present. Waking up, at least for me, was the instant death of this narrator who would make up stories about what had happened or would happen. Surprisingly, what also died was the more prevalent yet subtle lifelong voice, the one that (minus rare yoga or tantra episodes) had something to say about every arising moment.

My first clue that this real time voice-over had taken a tranquilizer was the time a driver dangerously cut me off in traffic – my pulse raced and I probably gasped or cursed aloud but then no thought followed. Not the angry thought about the asshole or the spiritual by-pass thought about how every thing happens for a reason, even my near death. No, in this case, the habitual commentary simply did not arise.

But it wasn’t until just the other day while watching my partner watch a golf tournament on TV, an epiphany happened: I realized the voice that used to engage a running commentary on the Life of Lori Ann, had not just quieted down, it had all but dissappeared. Just as if someone had pressed the mute button on the remote, the narrator of my moment-to-moment reality was no longer heckling or cheerleading. Instead, a spacious quietude replaced the blow-by-blow from a voice I’d gotten so used to heeding or ignoring, but never used to not-hearing.

After the Golf Game Epiphany, I realized that a big chunk (if not all) suffering arises from the narrator, with its commentary on past, present, future. Of course, this same narrator can often offer glowing commentary, praise in fact, that gives us a temporary sense of well-being: “Gosh, I did a good job on that,” or “I am sure I will succeed tomorrow at the job interview.” These “positive” comments are just as absent these days from my inner world as are the negative ones.

The result: Suffering has ceased here in what has been four months of equanimity and a “peace that passeth all understanding.”  This is not to say, anger does not flare (it has once) or that irritation does not arise (like when the puppy nips my heels, or my 12 year old leaves wet towels on the bathroom floor for me to pick up).  But emotional reactivity is no longer saturating the foreground of my life and even pain in my body is just that–pain in my body. But until the Golf Game Epiphany, I was not sure where the suffering self had gone to. Just how did I go from forty-something years of feeling the dukkha, the prickly sense of wrongness with reality, to this sublime okayness? I realize now this acceptance of what- is is our natural state, revealed when the narrator shuts up.

This does not mean that should my child die I would not feel immense grief. What it does mean is I would not likely hear an attendant story about that death, the story of “why me,” or how this should not be, or how could a just God allow this. Or if I won the lottery (yippee!) a thrilling jolt of delight would surely happen. But then a story told by the voice-over would not add on some kind of fiction to boost or detract from what is. Boost: “I am not just lucky, I deserve this win.” Downer narrative: “What goes up, must come down. Get ready to lose it all.”

I invite you to spend a day listening to the sports commentator that lives in your head. Listen closely to the non-stop labeling of what-is, which is always one step out of the moment and no more powerful than the hockey announcer shrilly declaring, “He shoots, he scores!” That sports voice on your TV did not have any real power other than to spin what is. If that announcer was biased toward the other team, for instance, the delivery might have been a somber declaration that a goal was conceeded, not won. Either way, the commentary is not the reality.

In this way, the sufferer is not the real you. That voice in your head that is always commenting on what is, or looking back or forward with a narrative of should-haves or will-do’s is just that – a passive voice, but one mistaken as active and causal.

You are not the narrator you think you are. You are the silence.

Awareness is Here! (shhhh!)

Lori Ann

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