All posts by Cate

What do I know about woman?

Posted by on May 1, 2011

What do you know about woman?” he asked, brown eyes flat, boring into me, through me. It was as if the universe itself were asking me the question.

I psychically shrank back in my comfy, overstuffed chair, wishing I were just about anywhere but pinned under that gaze. What do I know about woman? I thought.

Repeating it in my head didn’t help. What a damnable question. I stalled with a weak attempt at humor.

“Aside from what I know being one?”

His gaze didn’t flicker. No trace of a smile, he waited.

I had come to the interview prepared to ask Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev questions, not give him answers. Seventy-five questions to be exact. And now, within minutes of sitting down on the sofa next to me in the hotel lounge, I was the one on the grill. Damn gurus. They don’t play fair.

I had to admit his question was justified. After all, if I was going to interview him about the feminine, he needed to know what I knew just as much as I wanted to know what he knew. I just wasn’t ready to go first.

“Well,” I started slowly. “I’ve read some feminist literature, Western of course. And … and I’ve spent a lot of time meditating on the nature of the feminine and masculine as primal creative forces.”

It wasn’t the answer he was looking for. It wasn’t the answer I was looking for either. His hands slowly smoothed a section of his linen robe. He glanced away, giving me breathing room, his long salt and pepper beard flowing across his chest as he turned his head to look towards the wide windows overlooking the marina. He was wearing socks with his sandals, I noticed idiotically. With a copper ring and thread around one ankle.

Was there any meaningful reply I could give that wasn’t based in my life’s experience? Probably not. But how to make sense of what I knew? So much understanding about the feminine had only recently come to me, prostrated face down on the white marble floor of the temple, left arm outstretched towards the outrageous eight foot tall obsidian yoni with its ten stubby arms and three eyes, swooping golden eyebrows and nose ring: the Linga Bhairavi, the new goddess Sadhguru had consecrated in India just weeks beforehand.

Unstoppable life force now flowed from the linga, saturating the temple compound at the ashram in the Velliangiri Hills outside Coimbatore. Lively, enticing, potently inviting … when you sat in her presence the Linga Bhairavi reintroduced you to the dance whether you wanted her to or not. She hurled life at you, into you, around you like a whirlwind. And yet she was gentle, laughing, amused at the thought you might think you could be something other than her.

Silly human, she breathes. Life is everything. There is only one face of God and it’s me.

This is the answer I want to give him. But I don’t know how to say it in an organized way that can be easily heard and logically understood. Perhaps it is the impossibility of the short answer that mutes my tongue. If only I could take the long way around and tell him the story of my life. It would all make so much better sense.

Turns out, he was about to give me the chance. Turning back and skewering me once again with his gaze he said, “We can go to the conference room and you can ask your reporter questions. And I will give you reporter answers. It will be a very one-dimensional approach to the feminine.” He cocked his turbaned head and reflected for another moment. “I don’t want to do that.”

No interview? My heart sank even as it still pattered nervously in my chest. What the hell had I spent the money flying down to LA for this interview for!?

“A question and answer format won’t go well in the West either.”

It was a flat statement. After only a few seconds thought, I reluctantly agreed. It would work in India and be well received amongst the Isha Yoga practitioners who were Sadhguru’s followers around the globe. But preaching to the choir was not what either of us had in mind. He raised his brown eyes back to mine, measuring. “It should be a story. You should write a story about the feminine.”

My heart sank. I should write a story? Christ, I couldn’t even answer the simplest question about what I knew about woman, let alone write a whole frickin’ story. Shock and dismay must have been written upon my face, for he smiled tolerantly (if not a little impishly) as he rose to his feet. The non-interview was plainly over. My task had been assigned. After a few closing words (very few), I bowed solemnly back at him and watched him walk away.

The next step on my journey towards understanding the feminine was about to unfold.

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Beneath fear … LIFE! part 2

Posted by on April 10, 2011

Magic was afoot from the first moments. After scouting for the place to build the medicine wheel, I formed a mound of sand then secured the central stone from Olympia on top of it. Stepping back, a glittering caught my eye. What was this? Gently I brushed away the grass. Half-buried within inches of the Olympia stone was a smooth, smoky red quartz crystal, about two inches long. Wow! Talk about the Welcome Mat being set out! I replaced the crystal, fully exposed now to the light. From that moment on, the wheel built itself, one element after another asking for inclusion … fern fronds, tiny English daisies, fans of cedar needles, a rose quartz crystal heart from Costa Rica.

The dawn ceremony was sweet … the intention the creation of the medicine wheel and all the healing it would bring to man and to the Earth. Then came all the rest of my morning duties taking the requested samples and establishing camp.

At the noon ceremony the Super Libra full moon that would peak at 1:10 pm asked for acknowledgment. The tide was smashing into shore, waves galloping every which way in a maelstrom of energy. And it wasn’t even high tide yet. Balance—the signature of Libra—seemed elusive. The energy increased. Waves that had traveled for thousands of miles careened into shore. Deadfall logs swept into the sea from the rainforests crashed together, booming like drums, beating against the base of the small sand cliff below. Wind driven rain lashed my face, pouring wetness on the fire that smoked the sky.

Illusion—the other hallmark of Libra—was being swept away. This moon was the herald. No longer could we sustain the illusion of our separateness from life. The Earth, the cosmos itself was demanding our full participation, thumping its chest, insisting on being seen and taken in.

High tide and the moon’s peak approach arrived within 37 minutes of each other. The energetic forces were beyond belief. This was the climactic meeting ground between the water and earth elements. A place where everything, every blade of grass, every bush and tree was molded by forces so huge they reduced the coastal reality to a narrow line drawn in shifting sand. I felt like a twig tossed in a massive flood, and yet still the energy built. I lay face down on the earth, arms outstretched towards the medicine wheel and let the energies pour through me. There could be no containment … only surrender.

I lay there for an hour? Slowly peace prevailed. The ravaging peak was over. The Earth held me. I held the Earth. Only much later after I had gotten up and changed my sodden clothes did I realize Kristine’s prediction had been a true one. Tsunami energy … impossibly powerful and relentless and yet, with surrender and love it could become peace …

Filled with gratitude, I watched the seas calm throughout the afternoon. Rain continued to pummel the shores to the north and south. But Kalaloch was suddenly blessed with only intermittent sprinkles. The wind died away. Patches of blue flirted with the clouds. I laughed and sang songs of love to the Earth and sky, ocean and fire.

The rest of the weekend passed like a song. My best friend, Fiona, unexpectedly joined me Saturday night. As the Sunday dawn ceremony concluded I wondered aloud what this world would be like if everyone entered the day honoring and acknowledging life with open gladdened hearts? In answer two eagles flew down the beach, landing directly in front of our camp. Soon a third eagle flew in. They stayed for almost an hour, busying themselves with a feast of razor clams. The message was clear…. Open your hearts and all shall be given because the All has been received.

Midnight ceremony and mystery beckoned. We are walking into the unknown! Yet somehow even this complete unknown future we are all creating is somehow familiar. How not? Time is not linear. It is vertical, containing only the Now, and the Now and the Now. Everything is held in that Space from the beginning to the end of Time. And then the cycle will begin anew—all the knowns rebirthed as a mystery to be breathlessly rediscovered over and over again.

On Monday we did not want to leave and yet it was time to go. A solitary eagle flew into the trees above us, calling, calling. Fiona waved goodbye and I resumed striking camp, disassembling the wheel, taking care of all the mundane details restoring the site to its original pristine condition. As I packed the last things away, the eagle gave a last series of calls, reminding me he was still there—an undeniable talisman showing me that my prayers had been heard … that all our prayers had been heard and that they had been good prayers.

Weeping in gratitude, I watched as he flew away towards the north, never hesitating or faltering in his determined course. I watched in admiration and vowed to never look backwards to my own past either.

It was my task to go to Quinault—a task set by Spirit—a task that would give me the opportunity to experience Life itself in a new way: Life as ceremony, ceremony as life. The most common situations filled with riches; the simplest action filled with meaning; every moment blessed with the full participation of all Life’s creatures showing up, doing their part in the play.

Thank you Blue Thunder. Thank you Kristine. Thank everyone who joined the wheel. Most of all, thank you Mother. Thank you for letting me know I no longer need forgiveness … only to participate fully, in gratitude every moment the rest of my life—a life that will never be the same.

Photo credit: Bill Nicholls

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Beneath fear… LIFE

Posted by on April 1, 2011

When you follow your heart you never know what’s going to show up. If you’re lucky it will be a hard road—not an impossible one—just hard. For difficulties are always self-inflicted blocks and wounds showing up to be healed and released. In my case the block I stumbled over after signing up to serve as ambassador to the Quinault Nation site on the Northwest Medicine Wheel was fear.

By age 59 I’d thought I’d pretty much done with fear. I’d loved and lost many times, and lived alone many times. I’d met death. I’d engaged the demons of the astral planes when my third eye opened. I’d learned about energy and transmuting thought, done ceremony, let business and success and partners, houses and belongings go to travel alone in South and Central America. I’d met my greatest fear—abuse at the hands of men—during an ayahuasca ceremony on the Amazon River, deep in the jungles of Peru when the shaman’s camp was attacked by bandits. I came to no harm … but the terror that had lain dormant inside me, deep in the genetics of my womanhood, produced a hard lesson to endure that night.

After that I thought I had emptied myself of fear. But I was wrong.

“Did you know there’s a massive earthquake due to hit the Northwest coast this weekend?” breathlessly asked a friend. “And there are supposed to be tsunamis hitting our coast—bigger than the ones in Japan!”

Youtube videos of geologists’ predictions arrived, unsolicited, in my email. More people called on Thursday to inform me that the weekend of the vernal Equinox and the Supermoon of March was going to be a doozy of disaster. Hang onto your hat, they all said, and put up emergency supplies.

Now ever since I was a little girl I’d had dreams—nightmares—of tsunamis. For over a decade I refused to go near the oceans and for another decade I was nauseous with terror just being near the coast—always on the lookout for that telltale withdrawal of the waters, always on the lookout for high ground to flee to. Eventually as I did more inner work the fear faded, and I lived for months on the west coast of Costa Rica, soaking up the glory of tropical beaches. But now my friend’s warnings stirred up a veritable storm of old emotions. The Quinault site was right on the ocean and all sorts of disaster images started parading through my head. Soon the fear got so bad I decided to resign my ambassadorship. After all, consciousness is non-local. I could put my energy at Quinault without having to send my body along with it.

Would it really matter if I skipped facing my fears … just this once?

Thank God for the Thursday night sweat. I offered my terror to the flames—the antipode of my watery visions. And in the heat and sweaty darkness perception of LIFE returned—that sweet grounded space of connectedness where all the illusions of the mind are shown for the phantoms they are … phantoms we all harbor and indulge; phantoms we traumatize ourselves with, allowing them the director’s chair of choice.

I left the sweat, shaky, but determined to stay in the present breathing moment. If I could stay there, perhaps I could manage to honor my word and commitment to Blue Thunder, to the Earth, and to myself. Maybe.

Friday morning and the ambassador’s meeting arrived. Blue Thunder listened gravely as I expressed my fear that I could not keep my fear at bay, my concern that I would drag it into ceremony, polluting the wheel. And he spoke of the forces that would pull us all down, that would hinder the progress of all peoples back into the light of Self awareness, knowledge and Spirit. After a cleansing he assured me I would do just fine. Kristine gave me the not-so-reassuring understanding that I was taking on tsunami energy for the entire planet to transmute. Feeling somewhat like a determined little donkey given its assigned burden to bear, I went home to prepare for the weekend.

On the road by 2:30 in the morning, the moon was riding high in a blackened night sky—the first clear night in weeks. As the miles clicked past, the trees and fields, forests and rivers and steams all seemed to nod at my passing, lending me their sturdy handle on the eternal nature of the life force, giving me strength and an acknowledgment of oneness. As I swept towards the coast an enormous tide of life energy rose with me, cradling me in its arms.

Kalaloch … “a good place to land” in the Quinault Native tongue. A good place to land, indeed! A secluded glade overlooking the thundering ocean from a small bluff, the surrounding fir trees were carved into individuality by the winds; their twisted forms toughened by the fierce energies where water and land meet. The grey sky was heavy with clouds and rain. The surf pounded even at low tide.

I had arrived at my destination. The story was just beginning.

Photo credit: Bill Nicholls

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Showing up for Mother Earth

Posted by on March 15, 2011

For all that I spent three years as the NW editor for the national Native American newspaper, Indian Country Today … and despite the fact that I discovered during my tenure that I’m an eighth blood Potawatomi and could apply for tribal membership, I haven’t been much inclined towards Native American rituals and ceremonies. It’s not that I don’t think they’re wonderful or effective. I do and they are. It just hasn’t been something I’ve been drawn to.

And then last weekend I attended a presentation on the big Pacific Northwest medicine wheel being performed over the weekend of the Vernal Equinox this year—March 20, 2011. Headed up by Shoshone Elder Bennie LeBeau, better known as Blue Thunder, the wheel is centered in the Washington State Capital of Olympia. It has eight spokes radiating out to specific points where individual ceremonies are to be held. The circle itself comprises an area of almost 29,000 square miles. The intent? To bring healing to the fractured energy ley lines of the earth and to all creatures, big and small, living in this area of the world.

The presentation was two days after the Japan earthquake and tsunamis. Images of onrushing waves choked with thousands of cars and buses, houses and flaming wreckage still reverberated through my mind as I sat in the audience and listened to Blue Thunder. He quietly spoke about the damage that has been inflicted on the Earth in the last few hundred years through greed and unregulated industrial development. He spoke of the predicted earth changes that were arriving in response to this abuse. And then he showed a film documenting several medicine wheels he had conducted in the U.S. in the past decade and how they shifted energies of imbalance and destruction into life-filled positive manifestations. ( see  http://www.earthwisdomfoundation.net/ )

A Grand Teton medicine wheel ceremony took place in 2004. Within weeks an enormously dangerous lava dome building at a potential super volcano site in Yellowstone National Park subsided. Drought in southern California and Georgia was miraculously ended. Wherever the ceremonies were held, the earth and her wildlife responded positively and swiftly. I sat there in the darkened theater and thought, why wouldn’t I get involved in working with our Great Earth Mother in this way?

Yet out of the 28 federally recognized Washington tribes contacted to join the ceremony, only a bare handful of members responded. Of the nine sites in the upcoming ceremonies, one point on the wheel was unrepresented. No volunteers were available to build and tend a sacred fire at the Quinault Nation on the coast and keep it burning day and night over the three days. No one would be there to sing songs and say prayers from the human heart to our mother. Members of that nation were apparently not interested.

A small and polite group of local Native college students from Evergreen State College gathered outside the theater where we were meeting, quietly handing out protest information. People co-opting the Native medicine wheel for healing the Earth was not appreciated. We should leave well enough alone and go home.

No one did.

We are all natives of the Earth, no matter our skin color or history. And if the dunces in the classroom of life want to catch up on their ecological homework, realize we are all one and act to preserve and protect our mother rather than exploit her, isn’t that cause to celebrate? Can’t we let the memory of old abuses, anger and blame go? Can’t we set a new day into motion? Isn’t it time?

It is time … and then some. So I followed an internal whispered prompting and walked up to Blue Thunder’s wife after the presentation was over—a white woman named Kristine—and volunteered to be the ambassador of the wheel at Quinault and keep a fire burning over the three-day ceremony. I don’t know any native songs. But there’s one in my heart that beats to the same rhythm as the Earth’s. I don’t know any of the rituals. But what does it matter? Caring enough to show up with pure intent for blessing is enough to make all the difference in this beautiful and weary world.

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Are my feelings valid?

Posted by on March 1, 2011

Face straining to keep control, tears in her eyes, hands unconsciously clenched on the table, the question tore out of her, “Are my feelings valid?”

A highly attractive, smart and successful professional woman, my friend had been in a debilitating relationship for ten years before the guy finally slouched off, leaving her devastated and relieved all at the same time—a confusing mix of feelings to be sure.

Now, more than a year of disinterested dating later, she had found if not “the one,” then at least a possible contender. “He says and does all the right things,” she moaned, elated and fearful. “It’s terrifying.”

“What kind of things does he say?” I asked.

Her face smoothed, taking on more of a dreamy look. “Well, he says it’s ok with him if we take things slow. That he would prefer it that way himself. And that he respects me, and … oh God, it’s so perfect I don’t trust what he says.”

“Considering what you went through with Steve, that’s perfectly understandable.”

“I shouldn’t doubt him. But I’m so scared inside … scared that I’m making another mistake, that my judgment is all screwed up. I want him to be affectionate and he is and oh God! He kisses so great!” A grin rose to the surface only to be quenched. “But that makes me nervous too. So I keep telling him I don’t want to sleep with him until we’ve gotten to know each other better. And that’s really what feels right, but … God, what’s wrong with me and all these stupid emotions?”

I looked at her in astonishment. “Alison, if you’re feeling these things then they’re valid. Whether your concerns are warranted or not—only time and his actions will tell you that. But you’re entitled to your feelings. There’s nothing wrong with being shy and uncertain and scared. If he can’t handle your genuine feelings, then screw him—he’s not the right guy.”

She looked up, blue eyes red-rimmed. “You think so?”

“I know so.”

My conversation with Alison mirrored others I’d had with other women in other places and times. It didn’t matter what the triggering event was, each woman felt guilty about their emotions and questioned whether they were entitled to feel the way they did or not. Most seemed to have no clue that women genuinely have a deeper sensitivity than men, a greater dimensionality and subtlety that is expressed through their widely varied emotions and complex reactions to situations. And if they were aware of this, they sidelined their marvelous sensitivity to nuance and deeper levels of meaning, disparagingly calling themselves “over-emotional train wrecks.”

Since when did we buy into this whole “no emotions are good emotions” routine? The tough talkin’, flint-faced, unflappable John Wayne image doesn’t even fit guys, let alone gals. So why are intelligent, educated adult women putting themselves through this kind of guilt trip about their feelings? When did we learn to doubt our intuitive nature so much that we experience anxiety just by listening to what it’s telling us?

Sure, some of Allison’s mistrust might be her past experiences talking. But so what? She’s entitled to feel mistrust. She’s earned it. And maybe she’s right to doubt this new man in her life. Maybe she’s picking up a subtle vibe. Maybe something really isn’t quite right. Truly, only time will be able to tell her if her instincts are on target or not. But only if she follows them.

She should take the time … all of it she needs, until the situation intuitively feels right with this new guy. If he sticks with her, it’s a win-win. If he doesn’t, she’s saved herself from another fall the only way possible—by trusting her inner self.

But by letting doubt rule, by letting some sort of externalized social norm dictate how she should feel and how fast she should let a new person become intimate, she cuts herself off at the knees, diminishing herself. And not being true to herself, what kind of partner will she be? How grand is the offering to her new potential mate?

How else can we learn to trust our intuition unless we follow where it leads and learn from the experience? How can we increase our compassion and have wisdom and joy to offer others unless we first have compassion for ourselves and learn to quietly trust our feelings and the messages they constantly deliver?

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