She is a Wise Woman
She is a wise woman. Very wise. Wise as in the wisdom of the tribe’s elders. Of a woman who saw much and was not afraid to touch what came her way. It is a pleasure to talk to her and see with her, because even when I say what she didn’t remember until a minute ago, the tenderness and the wide scope of understanding, evoke the spirit.
She studied with good teachers. She chose them carefully. Nor does she hesitate to doubt and even rebel. She is a brave one and one who believes that you can live, what you go through in a workshop or see within a great teacher. She has often defied a teacher, and it is hard to forget her, after having her in a group or workshop.
And alongside the wisdom, on the fringes of knowledge, there is a vibrating layer. I feel the vibration moving uneasily, when I tell her that the thought of having to help someone is a mistake. That when she learns to be a teacher, it is a particularly important understanding. She tells me “obviously” and I hear the fear. She tells me: “There’s nothing to dwell on here. It’s done” and I hear: “just don’t touch me there”.
The entire structure of work she has learned to do takes the damaged and the wrong and rectifies it. Mainly, it takes the illness and cures it. Yes, yes, it also teaches them to heal themselves and locate problems quickly. But still – the movement goes from the “no” to the “yes”, from the “there isn’t” to the “yes, there is”.
When I say that “there isn’t” is a thought, that “lacking” is a fleeting and fragile imagination, that taking someone from place to place is not possible. That they are already beauty and wisdom, wonder and light, and so it has always been, when I say all this, she is frightened. “It was already the floor”, her eyes say. The carpet has been pulled out but only recently. slowly. Please slow down. And when I listen quietly she breathes it in and a smile spreads across her face tenderly.
She’s home now. The effort has stopped. The eagerness goes down. The vibration rises and she rests.
Wise woman of the tribe.
She’s not lost.
She knows she doesn’t have to find the way.
The road has always been there and her legs seek walking.
No, actually, dancing.
The confusion
The thought tells us that we are broken and need repair. In fact it is a thought planted in our heads, that there is something that needs healing and is not complete as it is. That there are people or processes we need to go through to learn to deal with these flaws of ours.
This thought supposedly makes life “easier” because if something is screwed up in us then it can explain why things sometimes don’t work out the way we would like them to. Relationships, family, love, money, everything can easily be explained by this “fuck-up” we have in our system and until we work on it and fix it, we will not have the life we imagined.
The gate
The truth is simple, almost corny. We are perfect and whole. That’s how it is.
Any other learning is unnecessary.
Every time we think we are lacking we are wrong.
Whenever we think we are not – we are misleading ourselves and others. We are. We have always been like this. This is our nature. This is our spiritual wisdom. And we forget or argue with it and argue otherwise. We are wrong to think “no” and “not enough” because we don’t believe in this beauty anymore. We have learned to look from the “isn’t” to the “is” out of fear that things will be taken away from us, that we will be down-sized, that we will be drained out of meaning and respect.
If it’s impossible to touch this dimension of pure energy, if it is completely alive and vibrating by nature and we cannot change it, if suffering and disability comes from our belief in the thought that we are limited and lacking and not from this very fact – how will you live? What would you listen to? With what will you dance?