Tip Toe Through The Demons

Cold Wax, Oil, Pan pastel 10"x10"

Yesterday I went to a day long teaching on "Chod" practice.  What, you say, does this involve chocolate or shoes?  No, not for the moment anyhow. It's a practice from the Bon tradition, a lovely Shamanic, Buddhist tradition from Tibet that predates Buddhism. I love that the originator of the practice was a woman, a rather old woman,Machig Labdron,1054-1155.

The one day teaching on chod was a bit like an amuse bouche, a little something tiny and delicious to make you feel happy inside. It's an ancient practice laced with a large helping of fierceness and depth. The shamans who practiced chod used to travel around to fearful places known to have bad energy (are you thinking Walmart? I thought so.) They hung out in charnal grounds (places of sky burials) and generally worked to tame and release dark energies. They cured illnesses, turned around epidemics and delved deeply into their fears. Quite the calling card.

Chod translates as "cutting through".  And in the modern world, as urban, householder shamans, what we're cutting through is attachments, those things we think we must have to make us happy.  Those things we absolutely need. Fill in the blanks.  What is that for you?  In the 42" screen view of your life, what must happen for it to be okay?  In the minutiae of daily life, how are things supposed to shake down? What attachments are so subtle that they breath you without you even noticing? Do you think things should be fair? People respectful of you?

 In my world I like things being reasonably easy, not too much trouble. I like it that way, and start to grumble when things don't comply with this world view.  I have opinions and beliefs that I consider right. Many of the things we want and like are fine in themselves, it's the "needing", the insistence that tips us over into attachment and trouble.  Geshe YongDong who led the Chod teaching said, "we have 84,000 thoughts a day. Sixty percent of those thoughts are about our attachments.  Any time you find yourself in a struggle, you've got attachment."  That's a sobering thought that I'm probably not attached to.

Ego clinging and fear is where the chod knife aims to cut, aiming to sever the attachment we have to ourselves, because ultimately one day we will have to give up our bodies, our loved ones and all the accessories we have accumulated.  Our practice is to learn to give up "stuff", views,  expectations as we travel around with our trusty chod knife.  When we get to the ultimate giving up, it will be less difficult, since we have been practicing internal and external closet cleaning in the days of our life. That's the plan and chod is the road map. Geshe YongDong pointed out that we are just renting this skin covered real estate. We don't get to keep it in any lasting way.

It's a shamanic practice so of course there are songs and a lovely little Damaru drum and some bells that get played to work on the unseen energies that bind us to our attachments, to give us the unseen help that we need to navigate the path toward living in harmony with what is.  We make our plans, we buy our stuff, we go about our daily lives.  But we spend our energies on learning to be more content and peaceful and generous. If we are successful it becomes less about us and the demons tiptoe off into the night.

Feeding Your Demons

I was going to crop this photo of the Buddha painting I just finished and then was amused because it looks like he's waiting for a call.  ET, is that you?

Last night I decided to listen to a Dharma talk and chose some talks by Tsultrim Allione of Tara Mandala.  I like her quiet presence and the fact that she is a woman who follows a practice from a female Tibetan tradition.  The talks were fine but they reminded me to return to her book "Feeding Your Demons" which is outstanding.  The book is subtitled "Ancient Wisdom For Resolving Inner Conflict" and is based on the ancient Tibetan practice called "Chod" (pronounce che).

It's interesting how we all have our thing.  Yesterday I was over at Peter's monkeymind blog and he said, okay after this I'm not going to write about fear anymore.  One of my great teachers has been my physical health and sometimes I think you might get tired of hearing about it.....  It can be a great source of frustration and longing and grasping for me.  Am I ever going to feel well? and blah, blah, blah?  I go over the same territory so many times it get's boring even to me.  But it's like a compost bin, lots of rich, stinky stuff here that makes the garden grow.

I decided it was time to bark up a different tree regarding my health (and I'm not even a dog person)  Maybe I  should meow down a different mouse hole??  But I digress in a fit of foolishness. Tsultrim Allione has a chapter on "The Demons of Illness" and so with a slightly nagging sore throat I turned to it and started to read.   In the afternoon as I worked in the garden I was aware of the vague sense of feeling crummy (and man, I could see how much I just want to push this away, in a poof, wave my magic wand, be gone, kind of way)  but I said to myself, "Self, maybe what you need to do is ask, what are these feelings of unwellness trying to tell you, what is the message here.  All the herbs and vitamins  have just not cut it."   

And so when I turned to Allione's chapter on illness I was ready to hear what she had to say.  I think she had been snooping on my thoughts..... because listen to her: "If we always treat the symptoms by trying to suppress them and never understand what the disease is trying to tell us, we may miss important information that the body is trying to communicate."  In another place she says. "If we can shift our conventional understanding of illness to see it as a form of energy, we can understand this way of healing..... In order for us to "get" an illness, it has to be able to find in us a receptive environment, like a key fitting into a keyhole.."

Now where is she going with this you might ask.  I have examined my inclination to feel responsible, inferior and a failure for "getting sick".  I acknowledge my part in it for the way I have used my mind, but that is not the whole story.  Sometimes I just wonder if it is my karma to be sick, but then I remind myself to be careful about that thought too.  Maybe yes, but I don't know this for sure.  I am aware that I can't will something to disappear, but I can do my part.  

And here's what Allione so skillfully reminds us when she sites the research of Candace Pert, a specialist in immunology: "she discovered that consciously setting an intention or creating a visualization can affect the "periaqueductal gray" (does this sound like some kind of parrot to you?), located between the 3rd and 4th ventricles in the brain.... it can explain how it is possible for our conscious mind to enter the network and play a deliberate part."  It's not so much that the mind has power, she says but "that the body and mind are one... intelligence is distributed democratically all over the body."  I like that.  We're a democratic entity.  At least democracy exists somewhere!  And this is in keeping with Buddhist thought that the mind is simply another sense organs with thoughts as their object, a nose smells odours, a mind thinks thoughts.  In the west we assign so much power to the mind.  It seems so unbalanced when you stop and think about it.

So the process of feeding your demons is one of finding the feelings of illness or pain in your body, personifying them and then sitting across from them and having a wee chat.  How do they look?  What do they want?  What do they need?  And how will they feel when they get it?  And then we feed them something to nourish them, a nectar that we create from our own bodies which prevents them from feeding on us.  She has a series of steps for this "chod" practice and it can be used for other things besides physical illness.  I won't explain it here in detail but it is definitely worth exploring.

I used this method when I first bought the book last year and found it helpful but then in true human fashion I forgot about it and went on to something else.   Call me crazy but I tried it again this morning and I don't have a sore throat tonight.  My demon looked kind of like this sharp nosed cartoon character, dressed in black, a little angled fedoa, arched eyebrows.  He found me rather weak and wanting, an easy host he said.  He told me I needed to have more faith, more belief in my self (but I thought there was no self???.)  Points taken.  His nectar was lemon pie filling which he slurped up with gusto, it was sunny and tart and sweet all at once and it was just what the demon ordered, apparently.   He said he would feel hopeful when he got what he needed.

Does this all sound somewhat odd to you?  For me it addresses the whole issue on another level, a level that is not connected to logic and reason, a level that is connected to the mystery that exists, to the unknown, the subconscious.  It addresses "the conflict" whatever it may be  on a level we seldom go to.  I am pushed there because logic and reason have failed to resolve my "conflict". I believe we are pushed to greater depths by our own suffering and conflicts, if we are willing to go there.  For me it is about having faith and following the call of my own intuitive self, not the little self, but that source of deeper knowing.  

Here is my wish for you.  May your suffering lead you to deeper understanding of life.  May it transform you.  May you emerge as someone deeper and wiser and more compassionate than the one who started out on this journey.  May your suffering be the kind that leads to the end of suffering. May you savour the sweet and sour all at once.  Now go... and fix yourself some lemon pudding or whatever your demons are shouting and banging on the table for.