On Ganges Harbour, Salt Spring Island, with Michael McBurnie’s beautiful sailing catamaran. 

See group picture inside cabin from left to right: Gregg Wilson, Garrison Smith, Berenice Nelson, Deborah Rubin, me, Michael, Ruth Smith.

Strike flint against stone: ignite fire.
Marry melody to poem: give birth to a song.
Blend thinking with feeling: mother emotions—
Those cyclones
that
corkscrew
me
rapture
or
gloom.

Flint or stone alone? Sometimes useful;

Long-term, primordial stresses (from my last post) are harmful party crashers, and often they don’t want to leave.  

Maharishi shared an example (not his exact words): say a dirty, torn, worn-out couch is in the middle of our clean and beautiful living room. It doesn’t belong there; it restricts what we can do in the room. But…if it’s been there a long, long time we might have become attached to it. We know it’s not good, but it’s become a part of the room’s identity.

I'm interested in traumas: how they got into me and how I can get them out. In the next few posts, I'll tell you what I’ve learned about those semi-sentient entities that get inside us and shut down our natural, happy song.

I had an untimely craving
for hot, buttered popcorn
just before going to bed.

“Come on! It’s just
a bowl of popcorn—
You had a tough day.”

Now, temptation & me
are an uneven match,
and it usually argues and wins.

Body awareness isn’t just for trauma—it’s also powerful for cravings. I’ll give an example from an encounter I had with Eckhart Tolle. Originally from Germany, he lives in my hometown, Vancouver, and on Salt Spring Island where I live now. I’ve met him several times; now and then I run into him on the car-ferry from Vancouver to Salt Spring. Lovely, unassuming man, and you can tell he speaks from deep.

Clarification: body awareness is a tool to be reached for only if needed—not as a daily practice like meditation or yoga postures.

At a symposium at Queen's University in Ontario, 1972, Maharishi explained how it worked. He also pointed out that even if someone doesn’t learn to meditate, just understanding this one thing—you can deal with negative moods by feeling them in the body—can be profoundly helpful.

I learned to meditate when I was 20. And just in time. A messed-up flower child, on a trajectory to the netherworld, I was often hijacked by paranoid moods:
“They know.  
They can read my mind.
I’m the only dufus on the planet who hasn’t seen the great white light.”

A few months later, at the big 1968 retreat in Tahoe, Maharishi gave us a weapon to slay negative moods:

Rishikesh, Cont. from May 15 post

Yogi Ramacharaka didn’t just propose that the body’s organs are simple conscious entities, he recommended a form of body awareness (more about that later) to communicate with them.

In chapter 19 of Hatha Yoga (click link below), he describes how the conscious mind can engage directly with an organ, especially one that’s not doing its job. His example?

Cont’ from May 10 post:
India, Spring 1970

Maharishi’s dazzling cosmic metaphor for the systems within the body— gods within gods within gods— had opened a new dimension for me: a profound and poetic glimpse into the living and intelligent parts of our bodies.

Then I found another way of understanding that truth.

One summer, on a hot day, I snuck downstairs to the basement, opened the big, white, top-loading freezer, and dug into the forbidden stash of gallon-sized ice cream tubs (ice cream was strictly for desert at meals; we were eight kids so raiding goodies was a felony).

Rishikesh, India, (Cont’)
During our course, someone asked Maharishi: what's the meaning of all those gods (lower case) in Indian philosophy? So many gods, yet the foundational teachings of Indian philosophy, especially Vedanta, affirm that all creation arises within a single, absolute oneness— Consciousness. As Dr. Tony Nader eloquently states in his book Consciousness Is All There Is, this ultimate reality is the sole essence underlying everything.

Here's how I understood his answer:

Rishikesh, India (Cont.)
Special Forces—That’s what monks are. In every culture, renunciants give up everything for enlightenment. They laser their focus on that one noble goal.

“Nature licks the feet of those whose heart beats for a single purpose,” said Guru Dev, Maharishi’s teacher.

When I first arrived in India in 1970, I rubbed my eyes—am I hallucinating? We walked out of the bustling Delhi airport to the taxi stand and: I was staring at a long, snaking row of dozens of taxis, all identical to my car back in Canada. It turned out almost two-thirds of the cars on Indian roads were clones of my car, the first automobile I ever owned: a green, 1956 Morris Oxford, which I bought in 1969 for $50.

My friends and I spent a week in Deli, visiting mystics and Vedic bookstores. Then we headed north, rested, happy, and excited, to Maharishi’s ashram in a caravan of old Ambassador taxis. In January the temperature in Delhi is perfect, but ascending to Rishikesh (1,200 ft above sea level), the air got cooler—and a lot cleaner—as we wound through farms and villages with huts and cows, buffalo, and the odd camel or even elephant: a scene that probably hadn’t changed in centuries.

From January to April 1970, Olga Campbell, David Cox, Gordie Hamilton, and I traveled to Rishikesh, India, to attend a teacher training course with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his ashram in Rishikesh, on the banks of the Ganges River in the foothills of the Himalayas. 

Last week we celebrated our 55th Anniversary of that wondrous TTC …

Am I a writer? Then burn from the sun
or shiver from icy cold
if my muse, intuition, flows forth about deserts
or icebergs and freezing snow.

I must be an immersive actor
so utterly lost in a role
that I’m Hamlet, Othello, Iago, (more…)

In the classic western novel, Shane,
the Hero declares:
“Ain’t no one
need be shamed
of being outgunned
by Shane.”

He was not boasting;
Shane was a master gunman. (more…)

Ancient Asian and North American indigenous communities honored an enlightened form of debating: they prioritized harmony over victory, offering a stark contrast to most competitive Western debate.

Contemporary Western debating often resembles a contest—

In this 27-minute video I tell stories about my years with working with Maharishi,  and the blissful adventures we had over the years.