Lifeletters: Shayla Wright's Blog

Preventing infection by H1N1

2009-10-29T02:17:00-08:00

PLEASE READ THIS AND BE WELL Preventing infection with H1N1 Dr. Vinay Goyal is an MBBS,DRM,DNB (Intensivist and Thyroid specialist), having clinical experience of over 20 years. The following message given by him; I feel it makes a lot of sense and is important for all to know. The only portals of entry are the nostrils and mouth/throat. In a global epidemic of this nature, it’s almost impossible not coming into contact with H1N1 in spite of all precautions. Contact with H1N1 is not so much of a problem as proliferation is. While you are still healthy and not showing any symptoms of H1N1 infection, in order to prevent proliferation, aggravation of symptoms and development of secondary infections, some very simple steps, not fully highlighted in most official communications, can be practiced (instead of focusing on how to stock N95 or Tamiflu):

Radical Creativity

2009-10-26T22:35:00-08:00

Miles Davis, the great jazz musician, used to say to his quartet: “Practice in your rooms if you like, but don’t bring that stuff to this stage. This is about being in the moment.”

Obstacles to our Natural Creativity

2009-10-24T22:09:00-08:00

Working with these obstacles to our natural creativity is a key part of The Alchemy of Writing process Obstacles to Creativity Fear of Failure--learn to bow to failure. It’s inevitable.

Numerology Readings

2009-10-21T17:19:00-08:00

Numerology Readings In person and by phone Live your life in a spirit of openness, confidence, and determination. In many of the ancient, indigenous traditions, the fall was understood to be the beginning of the year. As the harvest comes in, and we receive what we have sown, what has flourished and blossomed begins to return to the root. A whole new cycle of life begins. New beginnings are an exciting time, and they are also full of challenges. An essential part of every beginning is the process of clearing and completion, coming to terms with old patterns and ways of being that are ready to be released, so that we have a wide open space for something new. The Chinese sages called this part of life, ‘Difficulty at the Beginning,’ and compared it to the energy and vitality that a tender young shoot needs when it first pierces through the seed, or a young chick when it pecks its way out of the egg. It’s not necessary to do this all by yourself. That’s why autumn is an optimal time for personal coaching sessions and numerology readings You can learn to stop ‘tolerating’ what is no longer working for you, and open to new ways to being and moving in the world. A reading helps you to understand your human conditioning, to look at yourself and your life with compassion and clarity. It gives you a wider view, an understanding about the cycles of your life. It also allows you to open to the nature of your natural gifts and deepest resources.

Introduction to The Alchemy of Writing

2009-10-20T17:09:00-08:00

I am sending you this Introduction to the upcoming Alchemy of Writing retreat at Mountain Waters in Nelson. First of all, if you have already done a retreat with me, I want to let you know that every 'Alchemy of Writing' workshop or retreat is different. The process itself is alive, growing, and evolving, and so are you! Writing is like life-unpredictable, wild, and full of mystery. In order to help you prepare for this retreat, I’d like to make it clear that this way of writing is not at all geared to producing a specific result. That may or may not happen, but it not why we are coming together on retreat. We are going to explore what it is like to open to the unknown, and write from that place, without any idea of preference about where that carries us. This approach to writing is a spiritual practice, in the sense that we are working, moment to moment, with the nature of our conditioned mind. This mind avoids, judges, manipulates and controls. There is nothing wrong with any of these things, they are just what arise for us as human beings, again and again. At the retreat, we will be resting in the space of presence, and learning how to trust our creative energy to carry us beyond these conditioned impulses. You can ask yourself these questions, as you prepare for the retreat: Am I willing to receive whatever comes, as I write? Am I willing to inquire, and then sit without knowing, as something emerges? Am I willing to go below the stream of my thinking, and write from my heart, from my body and from this place of not knowing? Am I willing to let go of the ideas I have about who I am, and listen to new dimensions of my being express themselves? The more you can rest in this openness, the more the river of creativity, love, and wisdom can flow through you.

Great Love to John Daido Loori

2009-10-20T17:05:01-08:00

Dear friends I’m just sending this out to those of you who might have known of the work and teachings of John Daido Loori, the Zen teacher, who passed away very recently. It’s amazing to me how much we can receive from someone without ever having met them in person. John Daido was a great lover of nature, and of creativity, and he taught me much, especially about listening to the invisible transmission of rivers and mountains. He asked us all to love the earth, to care for this beautiful earth, with a sense of indivisibility. In Buddhist scriptures they speak of prajna paramita, the perfection of wisdom, as crossing the river: “Go, go, hurry, cross over to the other side.” John Daido invited us to understand that crossing over in many ways: “We can understand the other shore as being none other than this shore. We can also understand that the other shore crosses over to us...” In our work in Radiant Mind and The NDTT, it feels like the crossing over has happened, and that it continues to happen, and that the other shore crosses over to us in each moment....all of the above! with love Shayla

The preciousness of this moment

2009-10-19T15:39:03-08:00

This is a favourite poem of mine...it demonstrates the innate capacity of our authentic being to completely open to a moment, or a few moments, and allow those moments to carry us into the mystery of life itself. Arrivals Imagine the confines of a long grey corridor just before immigration at Washington Dulles airport. Imagine two Ethiopian women amid a sea of familiar international plastic blandness, entering America for the first time. Think of their undulating multi-colored turbans raised atop graceful heads, transforming us, a grey line of travelers behind them, into followers and mendicants, mere drab, impatient, moneyed and perplexed attendants to their bright, excited, chattered arrival. Imagine a sharp plexi-gass turn left and suddenly before them, in biblical astonishment, like a vertical red sea churning, like the waters barring Moses from The Promised Land, like Jacob standing before the ladder, a moving escalator, a mode of rising, a form of ascension, a way to go up they’d never seen before, its steel grey interlocking invitation on and up to who knows what, bringing them and everyone behind them, to a bemused, complete, and utter standstill. So that you saw it for the first time as they saw it and for what it was, a grated river of lifting steel, and involuntary, moving ascension into who knows what. An incredible surprise. And you knew, even through your tiredness, why it made them raise their hands to their mouths, why it made them give low breathy screams of surprise and delighted terror. You saw it as they saw it, a staircase of invisible interlocking beckoning hands asking them to rise up independent of their history, their legs or their wills. And we stopped as we knew we had to now and watched the first delighted be-turbaned woman put a sandaled foot on the flat grey plain at the foot of the moving stair and sure enough quickly withdraw it with a strangled scream, leaving her sandal to ascend strangely without her into heaven, into America, into her new life.

Lifeletter #39--Divine Unease

2009-10-18T19:37:00-08:00

Oct. 18.09 Lifeletter #39 Divine Unease There seems to be a kind of inner restlessness, a divine unease, bubbling up in all kinds of people these days, in relation to their work. “I used to be okay with this job,” they say, “but now, it just doesn’t feel quite right. I feel like I should be doing something else, something different.” “What do you want to do?” I ask “I don’t know. That’s the hardest part. I just can’t imagine what it could be...I’d just like to participate in something, be a part of something, and be of benefit.” “Ah yes,” I say, “that’s it, isn’t it? There’s something deep in the heart, something totally natural and uncontrived, that wants to fully participate in life, and be of benefit.” “Yes,” they reply. “I can feel it, and it doesn’t go away. But what is it? I really don’t know.” It amazes me how easily we can feel that not knowing is a terrible problem. We interpret it as a closed door, a sign of something wrong. That’s how we’ve been trained, almost all of us--to think that knowing is good, and that not knowing will get us into trouble. When we believe this perception, we create suffering for ourselves. We reject what we actually have, which is the space of not knowing. And when we reject what we have we do not empower ourselves. The only way to empower ourselves, to treat ourselves well, to respect ourselves, is to work with what we have.

Lifeletter 38--Fertile Ground

2009-08-14T21:30:00-08:00

It’s summer, the time when family members come to stay. I live in a town that is full of tourists all summer, and I’ve seen quite a few of these moments--in restaurants, on the street, in the park--when conflicts erupt between family members, and a perfect holiday appears to be ruined. I’ve also had several clients call me this summer, saying, “My mother-in-law is here for 2 weeks and I thought I’d be fine but I need help now!” These are the moments when when we feel trapped, cornered, by our own reactivity. We find ourselves behaving in ways that we never would have chosen. One client, Claire, has been telling me about a summer visitor who was expressing viewpoints about different races and religions that were extremely judgmental. Claire found herself smiling on the outside, and boiling inside with anger, unable to respond for fear of what she would say. These excruciating moments, no matter now unwelcome, are the fertile ground for our own evolution and transformation. And usually, in a situation where we feel bound and trapped, our thinking has created a world of polarities or extremes. Claire was like someone caught between a rock and a hard place. Her only two alternatives seemed to be a kind of false, smiling acquiescence, or a fierce confrontation. Both of these are extreme positions, based on a sense that this person is totally ‘other’ and separate from us. And if we look a little deeper, we’ll see that it’s not really ever the other person that is disturbing us-- it’s our own reactions. We can’t find a way to be ourselves with them, and we don’t know how to deal with all of the conflicting thoughts and feelings that are arising. In the Radiant Mind course, there is a great exercise, in which I consciously spend some time with a person who is outside my comfort zone. No matter how liberal or tolerant I imagine myself to be, there are usually certain kinds of people that I avoid. It appears that I avoid them because of who they are, but what I am really avoiding is my own experience when I’m with them. Whenever I do this exercise, I end up picking the rowdy street people in our town. And when I spend time with them, I get to see a whole stream of conditioning that sounds like this: “What’s the matter with you? What are you doing-you are wasting your life! Clean yourself up, and go get a job.” I hear these voices inside my head and they sound like my grandfather, not me. All I can do is just open to everything that is arising in the field of my awareness, without pushing any of it away, without trying to change any of my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes the voices and the feelings get more intense. But if I can just hang in there, without getting upset about how uncomfortable it is, they start to fade away. And I’m left with a clear and simple sense that this person has nothing to do with any of my judgments, and they have a perfect right to be exactly as they are. Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of non-violent communication, speaks about an experience he had in an Indian rickshaw, listening to a diatribe of hatred coming from one of the other passengers. He got so angry and so hurt by what this man was saying that he had to remind himself many times about the principles of non-violent communication. He just wanted to tell that person that everything they were thinking and saying was totally wrong. Until he realized that he was becoming just like his fellow passenger. That’s what we overlook, whenever we get caught in our own points of view. As soon as I deny you the right to be the way you are, as soon as I believe that you really need to be different, I have fallen into a belief structure that is based on judgment, separation and violence. When Claire and I were speaking about her visitor, I said, “When you are simply present, fully aware, not avoiding or judging, then a space opens up in which you are both allowed to be just as you are. And in that space, you’ll find a way to be with her beyond the two extremes of stifling your own response, or jumping down her throat.” “What would that be?” she asked. “I just can’t imagine how I could respond to her in a good way.” “You won’t find out by thinking about it,” I said. “You’ll find out by allowing yourself to be fully present, exactly as you are, without trying to change any part of your own moment to moment experience.” “Okay,” she said, “ but just give me an idea of another possible way to be here.” “Well, “ I said, “You could listen to her, and then say, “I’m hearing that you have lots of strong viewpoints about certain kinds of people. I imagine you must have had some powerful experiences to support what you feel about these people. So these views are very real to you--I understand this. And yet I have dear friends who fit in these categories. How is it that we have such different experience with the very same people? Have you ever wondered about this?”

Radical Responsiblity in Relationship

2009-07-16T20:30:00-08:00

Dialogue with a coaching client Dear Janet, I am wanting to write something to you about this whole issue arising for you around friendship, and the big questions we all need to answer about What is love? What is friendship? and How do I really want to be in relationship? Just like you, I find it so difficult when people I think of as good friends do not come through for me when I am sick.. This has probably been one of my biggest challenges, because it’s such a vulnerable, helpless place, where we actually do need love and support. So I’m not speaking to you as though I expect you to rise up one fine morning and not have these feelings anymore. Not at all. I think, for me, what has happened with my daughter over the past year has shown me that we can actually transform our deepest patterns and conditions, but only when we really see that they are no longer sustainable, and when we take complete responsiblity for how we create our own suffering, moment to moment. I see myself falling back into familiar places, again and again with my daughter, but I know now that I can’t stay there. I am committed to calling on awareness itself to allow me to see what is going on, and to let the suffering release, by itself. I can’t control what arises inside me, and sometimes the feelings are very intense. I feel hurt, abandoned, misunderstood, separate, invisible...all the feelings I’ve been trying to avoid my whole life are right there in front of me in such moments. I can’t control these feelings and I can’t control what the other person is doing or thinking or feeling. But I can choose what I will give my energy and attention to. I already know what my conditioned mind will try to do with these difficult feelings. It will try to avoid them, change them, or it will give them energy, indulge in them. Those are really the only 3 options I have on the level of my human conditioning. But there is always another possibility, I can stand present as awareness, and ask for help, ask for wisdom, ask for guidance. I can open myself to being with this person in a way I have never been before, and I can honour and respect myself enough to realize that this is possible. Not only possible, but that this is what is calling me forward, what I am longing for, what so many human beings right now are hearing: “The old ways of being with each other are unravelling at a tremendous speed. Something from a new dimension is required, another state of consciousness, something quite different from what my conditioned mind tells me is possible. I cannot possibly know what this new way is from where I am now. All I can do is be willing to stay open, stay present, and let go, again and again, of what is not working.” Janet: “Why is it always me that has to take responsibility? Why is it always me who has to let go of the old and embrace the new? What about them? Why don’t they change? Why don’t they wake up and smell the coffee?” Shayla: The answer is so obvious isn’t it? I have no control over the other person and what they may or may not see, do or understand.. And please remember, that the new way may very well include taking responsiblity for the fact that you no longer want to be in this relationship. Taking responsibility for ourselves does not mean that we have to put up with someone else’s crap. It’s actually the reverse of that. We put up with ridiculous behaviour only because we are not strong and clear enough to stand by our own boundaries and limits. We hold on to relationships for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with deep love and wisdom. You know all of this, and so do I, but putting it into practice is something else!