"There's nothing else in Twin Sisters except a dancehalle and more land, but that's the point."



"House in Kendalia" Acrylic on Board, Buzz Heye



It's 100 degrees.  Two AC wall units hum. I'm sitting in a rocking chair on a cement floor inside a tin building that used to be a storage facility that has morphed into a local gallery, The Bulverde Area Art Center.  Across the drive from the gallery is Mike's in the Village, a great destination, fine-dining experience with a rich, New Orleans fare.  It's located inside a 100 year old structure  that used to be a nine pin bowling alley. 

At four PM, it's so quiet, I can almost hear the old Germans who settled this area whooping "Strike!" across the landscape.  There are six vehicles in the parking lot: one of them is mine and the other five belong to Mike's employees.  Before I close the gallery at eight, six or so folks, three couples who've dined at Mikes, will stroll through, toothpicks in hand, nodding and pointing at the art.  They won't buy anything.  But they should. 

This show of local talent celebrates the 175th anniversary of Texas' independence from Mexico, so of course, it features some of Texas' most cliche scenes and images, including the capitol and a longhorn. The featured artist is retired architect, Buzz Heye . His piece titled "House in Kendalia" is my pick for best of show. Of course, Kendalia, an even more rural community than Bulverde located about 15 miles north of here, is one of my favorite spots on earth. I want to live there when I grow up. They don't have stores in Kendalia (well one very small ice house privately owned), especially not Walmart, which I've heard through the grapevine is about to build in Bulverde.  

Karl Vaught has captured a near photo-realistic image of the popular "Arneson River Theatre" located in San Antonio on the river walk.  While the Arneson Theatre is well-known and often visited by tourists, Robert W. Pettigrew's nostalgic oil on canvas painting of "Twin Sisters," another, even smaller community a few miles further north, depicts the elbow room and pastoral charm of the Hill Country landscape that Texans love.  The area is named for the two small hills in the painting.  There's nothing  else in Twin Sisters except a dancehalle and more land, but that's the point.

Next door to and inside the same building with Mike's is The Bulverde Emporium, a consignment antique shop. I'll let you know there's a spot open for lease in the shop just in case you're interested in doing business.  Besides the gallery, Mike's, The Emporium, a privately owned ice house, a post office, a couple of small business park strip centers, a courthouse, and a private air strip there's not much going on here in downtown Bulverde.  

Now if you go out onto Hwy. 281 at the intersection of Hwy. 46 about five miles from here, you'll see the world you know closing in on this sleepy German settlement:  Home Depot, a Super HEB (grocery), Chevron & Exxon gas stations, banks, schools, and soon, a Walmart.  


Progress.   It makes me sad.  And, I'm glad I no longer have to drive the twenty miles back to "town" (San Antonio) I used to have to drive for groceries.

You may be able to tell my age by my sentiment.  Good.  If you share any of it and you feel drawn to a simpler time, a slower paced culture, you can find a taste of it here.  The paintings are like a dream within a dream, the primary dream being the historical property and quaint setting in which they find themselves hanging.  


Bring a date.  Come see the art.  Dine at Mike's. Invite yourself to leave your i-phone at home & step back in time for a while.

"Arneson River Theatre" Oil on canvas, Karl M. Vaught





Entrances to Mike's in the Village & Bulverde Emporium




Emporium window panes




Adjacent landscape




Gallery exterior with antique tools




Gallery exterior




Gallery tin ceiling




Gallery rocking chairs





"Twin Sisters"  Oil on Canvas, Robert W. Pettigrew



blip of grace

  

photo courtesy of Creative Commons by AloneAlbatross via Flickr, some rights reserved
           

after Martha K. Grant

contentment stands
in the corner

her arms crossed
like a school marm
watching me squirm

—used to this kind of
tantrum she is completely

unmoved


this switch       has flipped &
i'm in the dark       again

my hands     i've run
along each familiar wall:

you shouldn't have done that
say you're sorry
maybe if i get some sleep

perhaps a bit of dark chocolate
i should go for a run

but no

i still can't see a thing

is anybody there
no response

anybody? 
nothing

i pace     bent slightly
at the waist    my arms

— probes groping the air      my eyes
—radar sweeping the screen

for a blip of grace      my soul

—a sonar

ping

Creating a Buddha Field

Photo courtesy of Creative Commons by Temari09 via Flickr, some rights reserved.



In early 2007, I met the strongest, toughest, most gentle man I've ever met.  I can truly say I love him.  I mean, I don't know him that personally, but I love the concepts for living he and his practice of the martial arts embody.  He was my Kung Fu Sensei.

I only studied with him for a few weeks.  "Why only a few weeks," you ask.  I now know, that what he was teaching me-to take up my own space, to be centered and strong in my own space, and to deflect aggression with graceful, inner power are still life lessons I am learning.  But, apparently, at that time, I was not ready.  I was finishing an internship to get my massage license, I was taking Level 3 of the Healing Touch Program's path to certification, and I was fighting cancer, but I didn't know it.

Spirit's Way is mysterious.  If I had not experienced the extreme fatigue that came upon me like boulders falling in an avalanche after week five or so of Kung Fu, I might not have pursued the diagnosis.  I'd had a small, but painful, lesion growing on my perineum for years.  I'd had three different medical doctors (none of them GYN Board Certified) look at the lesion and pass it off as "nothing."  I'd learned to live with the pain, but it was definitely interfering with my sex life.

Anyway, after focusing my martial intent on a huge bag upon which I placed the face of my father (more about that later), and kicking the screaming bezeeberz out of it, I came away from class feeling "better than I had in my whole life.," meaning empowered, strong, confident, capable, and liberated.  I remember saying that to a client.  Then boom.  I was flattened by debilitating fatigue.  I could barely finish my internship.
Grant you, the fatigue had come and gone before school and I had questioned whether I'd have enough stamina to do the work, but I'd been determined, an over-achiever to the death.  And that's what it felt like, like I was dying.  Well, I was.  At my root, cells were growing out of control and by the time they were surgically removed in late '07, they were at Stage Four-that's a nebulous demarcation right before they say, "You have XYZ cancer."

Now I say this: WOMEN!  ALWAYS SEE A BOARD CERTIFIED GYNECOLOGIST EVERY YEAR!  Thank God, I did.

Yesterday, four years later, I found myself in my backyard, punching the bleep out of a human who was non-physically present (I won't say his name, but it IS a HE) with serious martial intent (that's martial arts code for I'm going to kick your ass now).  Why?  Because, the memory of myself playing a victim's role with that human and suffering violence at his hand had surfaced with a vengeance and I wanted to clear it out of my field without hurting anyone while at the same time, empowering myself.  No telling how many times I will have to dis spell that memory and others while at the same time not perpetuating the cycle of violence and my belief in it: judge, blame, punish, and attack. No telling,  But I am willing.

I want to be clear.  Without blocks,  Without misguided notions that do not serve the Highest Good, my Highest Good.  Think I have my work cut out for me?  Yep.
  
So, I came home from doing Healing Touch sessions this afternoon and began pecking around on the internet for information about St. Germain because a client had told me they'd seen an angel in the room with us and I thought it might have been St. Germain (and the violet flame), as I had asked for his presence today.  As usual, I was lead (by Google and my preferences; btw, I love that they call those "cookies!") to this familiar version of the Tibetan compassion meditation on the "zenguidedmeditation" You-Tube channel.

According to visuals embedded in the video, the following are English concepts associated with the Sanscrit words of the mantra:  OM=generosity, ma=ethics, ni=patience,pad=diligence, mi=renunciation, hung=wisdom.  Another source, Awakening the Buddha Within, by Lama Surya Das says it means:  the jewel in the lotus (which might be the concepts above) and is the "divine mantra of unconditional love and compassion."  I like both interpretations, and have used the mantra over these last four years continuously, especially when I cannot get MIND to think my way out of what I FEEL, which is mostly always.  According to Das, the mantra is used to "create a Buddha field."  That sounds like a really good idea in this case.

Back to yesterday's anger.  What MIND told me I needed was an apology from the perpetrator.  I would need to use force to get that and it would create chaos not resolution.  So, I asked for clarity and punched the air.  Later, on Face Book, two different posts of folks I follow mentioned unconditional love.  And today, again, here comes a reminder of unconditional love.  Oh!  Maybe that's it.  Ya think?

I think I'm going to listen again.  And again.  And again.  And, I'm going to find my Kung Fu man because now--I think I'm ready!

Young Writer's Idea Box

Teachers can use this boxed set of twenty-two creative writing lessons and prompts as a stand-alone classroom writing center or for whole group instruction or both!  

Subscribe to this blog and leave the comment, "This educator loves it!" under this thread to be entered in a drawing for a chance to win your own free classroom set! (Forthcoming, 2011), then click to get  your free sample here!

Some Tide Turning: Writing Through Backlash

"universal shift" mixed media on paper.  copyright, D. Ellis Phelps 2013

 

backlash:  in metaphysics, a contrasting experience to joy, the psyche's way of reminding the mind of it's habitual way of being

 

A queasy sense of impending doom terrorizes me.  Again and again I return-rest in meditation, telling my mind, This is it.  No more.  Nothing else.  

 I practice mortality, sinking in as if death has come, waiting at tether's end for my Guide to sever the sliver chord, release me from all earthly attachment.

Otherwise, when I engage, watching events go by on this plane, I am like the mud hen ducks flying back and forth across the backyard sky looking for water, a place to land, to float, to be at home.  I feel a sense of urgency to do, to become, to work, to accomplish.  A tyrrant voice speaks demanding:

"More!  More!  More!  I wake at 1 at 3 AM, wander the catacombs, stretch and sigh, tell myself Not now.  My husband sleeps, snoring in his room.  I am safe.  He is not dead.

I fear financial ruin, a life without him of lonely isolation, emotional annihilation.  Then, some sanity speaks: Perhaps there is Grace.  If I were to have to endure such pain, maybe Angels of Mercy would fly to me, sprinkle me with living water until somehow I am re-membered by a thousand helping hands and some tide turning.

This is the fear, the reason I push myself out from under this tree at all:  these words are not enough.  

Of course not!  My practical mind agrees. Look. William Carlos Williams was an M.D. with a full practice.  Li-Young Lee, a warehouse worker because he did not want to teach.  You have not published your book.  You do not have "followers" on your blog.  You have debilitating self-doubt because of all this rejection.  And you would still, even if you did publish a book or ten.

So, the One Who Craves Safety, the One Who Fears the Unknown, the One Who Shrinks from Standing Boldfaced at the Edge says, Give up all this striving.  Come with me to the hiding place.  I will keep you safe.  We'll work at Home Depot.  We'll have regular hours and regular pay and we'll do a good job and get easy back pats.  No more of this craving recognition and applause.  Simple contentment will satisfy.  Quit.

Maybe, I really think failure would be a relief, much easier than all this humiliation.  To say blithely,  Oh!  I gave all that up. Like it was my healthy choice, a burden I no longer choose to carry.  I work at Home Depot now in the home decor department.  And I'd never have to explain that.  People would get it.

 I'd never have to write another clever query with a hook or an artist's statement fluffed with profundity.  I'd never have to be the only one on the block who can feel this ubiquitous, undulating, massive wave of human sorrow rising within me.

And there it is:  "the queasy sense of impending doom" does not belong to me alone.  It is cultural, planetary, originating from the race-mind. 

It is the Mississippi bleeding out.  It is a Japanese woman's wail.  It is a soldier commanding his hands to kill.  It is a road-rage shooting on I-35.  It is the senseless assassination of an officer by someone blinded with fear.  It is the last breath of the fawn born yesterday at dawn ceaselessly bleating, unable to stand and nurse.  It is the doe hoofing the earth where her fawn lay until last night when Earth Man's breaking heart had to bag the creature in the dark and carry it away because he could not bear to see the vultures come.

Physician Heal Thyself

Look at this!  It's really happening!  I have been visualizing this piece of my property dripping with birds and wind chimes, bronze sculptures, and crunchy pathways, hanging vines and Elementals for AGES!  Apparently, I'm ready to receive because my neighbor built the trellis shown here as support for the native Mustang grape vine last week and Earth Man is helping him install it.  I got so happy about this that a couple of days ago, in the blistering hot, I swung a pick axe (something I haven't been physically able to do well for years) ALLLL day leveling a spot for the patio bricks upon which the trellis will rest and under which I will happily sit, espeically in the morning with coffee.  I now have a  perfect spot for Mom's wind chime, the pink one with the hummingbird clackers and a tenor voice. 

 

So much good is happening now.  I have made a transition and I  know it.  I feel happy most days.  Wait.  Did I just say that?  YES!  I did.  Wow.  I can remember the day a few years ago (maybe ten) when  I sat on a cement sidewalk with a woman I know saying that happiness had eluded me most of my life.  And it has.  I had no idea how to be and stay in joy, how to lighten up, though many, many, many well-intended individuals have advised me to do so.  They just didn't know how to help me do it.

I don't take credit for the emotional sense of well being I am now experiencing more often than not (the credit goes to the Highest Understanding), but I do take credit for the willingness and the steadfast perseverance I've held to do the "work" of individuation and the courage I've had (that has been granted me) to walk the dark mystery of personal spiritual growth, turning time and time again away from the problem (my mind) toward the solution, which is Spirit.

Two years ago this month, I came under the care of San Antonio DO, Donna Becker (http://www.antiagingsa.com).  I was a mess.  I am eternally grateful for her wisdom and careful attention to my needs.  I highly recommend her.  She adjusted my hormone levels with bio-identical hormones and encouraged me to continue my journey toward healing, telling me that it was indeed possible, and pointing me to the book From Fatigued to Fantastic.

I followed her instructions and those of the book, receiving an actual TMJ dysfunction remedy by San Antonio orthodontist Dr. Risto Hurme, (www.tmjsanantonio.com), letting my body rest, receiving Healing Touch and Rolfing, and finally in March of '11 giving up sugar (almost succeeded in giving up caffeine, but not quite yet).

Also, I've just returned, for example, from a retreat in the Georgia woods where I studied Healing Touch (HT) Level Four, received the gifts of eight consecutive sessions of HT with other students, walked the Labyrinth (twice), walked the woods, and listened deeply to the river and to myself.  I was moved, literally, into a new vibrational level.  My poem on the "what i write page" of this site was written there.  I have written several since. 

This weekend, I studied again, this time a version of cranio sacral therapy as a compliment to my HT practice and learning.  Again, I met powerful, authentic women and experienced a Great Movement within me.  More later.  Today, I received a long distance session from the therapist who taught the class, and together, we identified a somatic trauma pattern that I've long held and that I've known (sensed) was present but couldn't budge without help.  I sensed its movement within me today and felt it shift.  YES!  YES! YES!  Positively orgasmic these holistic ways of being present to the Self so that the self can heal.

Further, I've seen a practitioner within the last month who gave me an Electrodermal Screening and identified possibile patterns/blockages for me/with me for which I've been receiving herbal and homeopathic remedies for about 18 days.  And, since I found www.tomkenyon.com (reknowned sound healer), I've been doing a specific meditation his guides recommend for receiving Light Source Energy Medicine.  At any rate, I am feeling positive, clear, focused, motivated, energetic, and grounded.  Good.  Plus, my physical stamina becomes stronger by the day as I've added vigorous exercise into my days (and for about six years prior to 2011, any physical exertion at all created a serious back lash in my body that felt like the flu). 

I'm simply amazed and full of gratitude.

So, your guess is as good as mine as to the actual fulcrum for my present state of expanded awareness, but I'll take it! Yessiree, I'll take it!

 

 

Offering

I am offering an hour long Healing Touch Session (not massage) at my new San Antonio space for a suggested donation of $25 to the first ninety-three clients who schedule an appointment with me.  I will be receiving four clients per day at 9 and 10:30 AM and 12:30 and 2PM (except for occasions when my schedule may vary) and I will be working from the West Ave. space every other Tuesday and Friday (Tuesday one week and Friday the next except when my schedule varies). 

I am delighted to be sharing space with Carol Masters, RN, LMT, Reiki Practitioner!  The space is comfortable, generous and somewhat centrally located in the Commons West professional office building.  Here is a Google Maps link to the location:  11230 West Ave. #2207, SAT 78213 . 

 

During the first session (unless I have seen you before), I will do a fifteen minute intake interview to determine your healing goals and get a brief health history and you will receive a forty-five minute hands-on session on the table that includes time for feedback at the end of the session.  In subsequent sessions (yes, you can book more than one and in fact I encourage it because the power of subtle energy work is cumulative), the update is much shorter, allowing more time for hands-on interventions. 

Healing Touch interventions address the client's health holistically from a mental, physical, emotional, and psychological level.  Interventions are done with the client fully clothed and resting comfortably on a massage table with meditative music and dim lighting.  I may also use therapeutic grade essential oils as part of your session.  My hands will either rest lightly on or slightly off the body as we work together.  Most clients feel deeply relaxed and centered durng and after a session, and may experience sensations of warmth, cold, tingling, movement, vibrations, etc.  Most achieve a deep state of relaxation and often sleep.  Reasons to seek Healing Touch are myriad, but Healing Touch is especially effective for helping manage pain, realeasing emotional/psychological blocks, decreasing the need for medical/pharmaceutical interventions or increasing the effectiveness of those treatments.  Research shows that surgical patients recover more quickly and need less medication for pain.  Generalize fatigue and stiffness can also be eliminated and or improved with Healing Touch. And when a person cannot receive massage, Healing Touch is an excellent alternative.  For more information about the Healing Touch Program specifically, click www.healingtouchprogram.com. To view a YouTube introduction to Healing Touch, click here.

 

If you have never received energy work before, I encourage you to give this a try.  You can't beat the cost and you will be doing me a favor!  I need to document one hundred sessions of Healing Touch in order to complete the HT certification process.  I can work with five clients long distance (by telephone) or on animals as well.  Please email (dellisphelps@gmailcom), comment on this post, or call me (830-515-9204) to book your appointment and suggest this powerful opportunity to a friend.

 

 

Gifts of Mutual Tending

I shared the first freshly harvested, sea-salted cucumber (not pictured here b/c it's gone already!) with my Earth Man (new name for Mr. Friendly because it fits better and because he didn't like the sarcastic inuendo and I don't blame him) last night at dusk.  It tasted sweet, more like a melon, not bitter at all, yum!  It was an especially significant communion (I ate from one end and he from the other) because the veggie garden is a project we created together on a section of our homestead acre that we've previously  argued violently over how to cultivate. This year, for the first time since we moved here in 1982, we worked TOGETHER to till the soil, remove the limestones, buy the plants, dig, weed, water and nurture our crop.  We grieved together when the deer got into the gate and pulled every freshly planted specimen up by the roots and gasped in horror at the black frost-bite on the tomatoes and peppers the weekend before Easter.  When Earth Man comes home from his work in the world, he cannnot wait to strip bare-chested, dawn camo shorts and flip-flops and flee to the garden.  But most importantly, neither can I wait to be there with him, whereas in the very recent past, television, email, and phone calls kept us living together but not sharing intimate time or space. 

 

What if this outward and visible sign is indicative of an inward and spiritual grace?  What if the winter of our thirty year marriage is over.  Can it be that we are finally rooted, committed and willing to be careful with our own tender souls? Can it be that our tears have fed our soil, that the weeds will no longer thrive but instead that we will bloom and harvest the gifts of our mutual tending.

Untitled

Go to the mountain inside and breathe...

Untitled

 

 

 

Like the mighty cypress, may you be rooted in core earth energy and fed by the Great Flowing River today.

Blessing

May the wide blue sky bloom wispy white cloudlings all over you today!

21 Days Sugar-free

I have known for a long time that granulated sugar is poisonous in the body.  I have also known that I should stop using it, but, even though I've abstained from sugar for years at a time before, I haven't been able to do so completely and forever.  And for the last year and four months, I've been eating a healthy (and I use that term very loosely) dose daily in the form of cookies, chocolate bars (especially Snickers and Turtles), Hagen Das ice cream and Starbucks vanilla lattes.  I mean, dark chocolate is good for me.  Right?  It has all those antioxidants and acts like morphine in the blood stream.  Ahhh! The point. 

Yes, I'm addicted.  For thirty plus years, I have abstained from alcohol and other pharmaceutical mind altering drugs.  Well, I did use anti-depressants for a couple of years, a few years ago until I gained twenty pounds and felt more depressed than ever.  How is that helpful?  Create a drug designed to alleviate depression but make the drug deaden your ability to have orgasm, give you insomnia and anxiety, and make you gain weight not to mention that you might kill yourself because now you are not only depressed but suicidal. 

Anyway, I also eat a gluten-free diet and avoid dairy.  There are very good reasons for those choices but that is a topic for another day.  What I mean to say is that I have precious few feel-good, "take-me-away-Calgon" food choices left if I don't eat sugar.  Well, there's still caffeine.  Right?  Wrong.

Caffeine and I itch and zing.  Plus the dirty bastard picks me up like a roller coaster and drops me like a rock.  So does sugar.  So what?  Every addict knows that's the whole point.  UP!  No matter how far down you have to go afterward, UP! or mellow, not feeling what you WERE feeling is what matters.

So for thirty years at least, I've known that I use sugar and caffeine as a substitute for alcohol.  There's no shame in that.  In fact, some wise individuals helped me learn how to use them as substitutes when I decided not to drink again.  It worked along with lots of other interventions.

"Why quit doing what works now," you ask.  Apparently, I'm being called through my body to a higher plane of existence.  Do I go there voluntarily?  No.  I go there because what I was doing doesn't work anymore.  Period.  Despite five years of medically unexplainable debilitating fatigue (Oh! Sure. Docs have wrapped a name around it but can't find the root of it), despite unwanted weight gain and clear signs of allergic reaction (especially coughing) to the use of the two drugs together (sugar & caffeine), despite profound manic-like spikes and dips in energy, despite a bought with cancer and the knowledge I have that cancer feeds on sugar, I have been determined not to give up one more blessed thing until I have to do so.  Did I mention I quit smoking too?  You see how I might be resistant to letting go of these two VERY DEAR substances.

But, now I have to.  Turns out I've had a low grade bacterial (and viral, but I knew about that one) infection for who knows how long.  Bacteria and viruses feed on sugar.  Coffee and sugar acidify the system.  Foreign organisms thrive in an acidic environment.  (Read Alkalize or Die: Superior Health Through Proper Alkaline-Acid Balance).  On top of that, I'd begun to be less and less able to breathe deeply (or even at all sometimes) without coughing and noticed that the "coughing fits" almost always followed (drum roll...) my morning, afternoon, and evening cups of straight-up, leaded, espresso-like coffee.  Yes, I made the brew stronger and stronger with each passing week, buying special whole beans, grinding them fresh every morning to get the most flavor and, let's face it, kick!

Why quit 21 days ago?  What's so life-changing about March 24, 2011?  That's the day I had to begin a cycle of two, count them, two antibiotics to kill the bacteria I was so successfully growing.  Not okay. 

So I quit.  Cold turkey on the sugar (still eating high glycemic index foods but not granulated sugar or honey, so give me a break!) and have weaned down to quarter-caff coffee twice a day.  Whew!  What a ride. 

I'm pissed off in a flash at every indiscretion.  It happened yesterday on the phone with a customer service representative from an organization I'd joined who refused to refund my money.  I never do that.  I'm the passive one in the back (mostly, unless I'm not and I'm in your face).  My point is, my passion has surfaced and I can't think of a way to ameliorate it's whims.  And maybe I shouldn't.  Maybe all that fatigue was really me trying to hold ALL THAT back.  And there's a lot.  I mean I'm the locomotive off its tracks in my recent dream.  I'm the gargantuan, red elephant in another charging. 

What am I going to do with all this energy, drive, and ambition that I've been drugging for so long? 

Watch out, Baby.  Here I come!

Visual Art Portfolio Recent work

A Mantra for Tough Times

When you give voice to the truth within you, the angels also sing.

Lama Surya Das

Being Southern Baptist and baptized twice as a child, becoming agnostic as a young adult, returning to Christianity in mid-life as an Episcopalian and then as a Methodist while processing through formal discernment about becoming a traditional Christian minister led me to abandon all of the above and seek an alternative spirituality.

Engaging in the study of the Human Energy Field, becoming a Licensed Massage Therapist, and integrating that body of knowledge into my work as an artist-educator is my ordination.  Helping myself, the planet, and others heal is my ministry.

I don’t know about you, but walking the human path of ordinary days is challenging enough for me.  Between birth and death, I will walk many roads, each with its own landscape.  But in these economically, environmentally, and politically tough times it is easy for me to be convinced that remaining centered, not allowing apparent pitfalls and distractions to rob me of a fearless life full of joy and contentment is impossible.

"What do you mean 'apparent pitfalls and distractions?'  My problems aren’t apparent.  The problems of the earth aren’t apparent.  They’re real," you say.

That’s just my point.  Yes, the experiences we have are real.  We are having them.  Incomes fluctuate or disappear, bodies become ill, accidents happen.  But beyond all that, beyond the noise of those experiences and the passionate responses we allow them to evoke in us, is another reality.  The Reality.

That is “the truth within” of which Lama Surya Das speaks.

The Truth is that we are not merely our physical bodies.  We are much more and the influence we have as beings on the planet reaches far beyond our bodies.  Our thoughts have power.  What we focus upon changes the apparent reality we eventually experience.  Whatever I am thinking about strongly becomes my meditation and therefore my prayer because it sets up a certain vibration within me to which other like vibrations are attracted.

In other words, if I walk around all day harboring anger, I am producing in a real-time, physiological way, negative vibrations in my body, in the physical space around me (my auric field), and on and on into the atmosphere in the same way a light beam never stops.  It is simply not enough then to make a supplication to God to bless the one at whom I am angry.  If I vibrate angry (let myself hold onto the energy that is angry), I emit and attract angry or some other negative vibration of the same quality.

The only way any God can help change that vibration is for me to summon, focus upon, and then resonate “the truth within” which is of the Highest Vibration, BECAUSE I have free will.  If I want to hold on to the energy of anger, Great Spirit will not interfere.  But if I desire to release and move the energy to a higher vibrational level, Great Spirit Moves to help make this happen.  This allows the Highest Vibration (which is God) to change me from the inside out, remembering for me, through me who I Truly Am.

It is a quantum shift. The problem didn’t arise from the apparent level, so it’s no use me trying to “solve” it from the apparent level.  I have to choose to enter the non-physical dimension and trust the mystery of its workings.  Using a mantra is one way to do this.

A mantra is to meditation as the gadget is to a web page: an easy way to get where you want to go in order to achieve a task.  These sacred words of extreme power have been used for millennia to shift energies for the Highest Good in the individual practitioner and in the atmosphere.  It is not necessary to focus on the literal translation of the words.  In fact, it is not advisable, as the purpose is to lift the mind-body-spirit out of the literal world.

So, the next time you find yourself clogged, befuddled, tense, or simply undone try this:

Wherever you are simply begin by intentionally turning your mind away from thinking about “the problem,” and begin to sing or chant the following mantra:  Om Mani Pedmé Hung.  Om Mani Pedmé Hung.  Om Mani Pedmé Hung.

It is a Tibetan mantra, the divine mantra of unconditional love and compassion.  The words literally mean “the jewel in the lotus.”  Make up your own tune or say it in a rhythmic, patterned way.  Try doing this for as many minutes in a row as you can manage.  Even one minute of chanting can make amazing, palpable shifts in your perception of and experience of your world.

Reference: 

Awakening the Buddha Within Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World

Lama Surya Das, Broadway Books, New York, 1998.