Absolute Truth

April, 2018

I was finishing my 3rd Zen retreat – 8 days of silence, up at 3am to sit on my cushion, then walking meditation, then sitting then walking.  I equate it with a slow motion torture and have to remind myself it was self-imposed even. On my first retreat I wrote in my journal after day three, “Julie if you ever think about doing this again, DON’T!”   But it’s a little like having a baby, right? During labor, you’re thinking, or maybe you are screaming, I will never do this again!! But most women do, but I didn’t … have another baby that is but I did do another retreat and then another.  For somehow I found myself at my 3rd retreat as I guess I am a hard nut to crack.  For at that retreat, I glimpsed the other side of the torture and pain.  I remember the exact moment as I sat on my cushion and the bowl was rung and suddenly I became the ocean and fish were nibbling at my ears and my hair and then the bell was rung again… 40 minutes had passed and it seemed to be 4 seconds yet also an eternity.  Ah, Samadhi for a moment, a glimpse … yet not since … a touchstone experience. On the last day of the retreat, I received my dharma name. One had to complete three retreats for this to occur. I sat in front of the Roshi, my dear friend Junpo and he said my dharma name was Satya and my entire body melted.  I didn’t know what it meant but the sound of it as I sat before him could possibly be one of those clips that will replay on my deathbed. And, then the meaning… Absolute Truth. And any part of me that wasn’t melted instantly liquefied. Truth… what I had been seeking, what I had been looking for and craving my whole life. Ah, but be careful what you wish for…. 

Years later I chose to have it tattooed on my belly in Japanese Kanji symbols. It was mere months later that the bottom was violently pulled out from underneath me. Nothing external happened except that Pluto went over my ascendant. I didn’t know that was happening nor did I have prior knowledge it was going to happen, but happen it did and for two years I went down. My daughter Ari and I joked that maybe the tattoo artist had screwed up and actually tattooed, “you are fucked!” Well she joked and I tried to laugh but there wasn’t much laughter happening at the time. I learned that truth is not something to mess around with… asking for truth will remove any obstacles to it that stand in its way, maybe gently but often not so gently. My dark night of the soul as I refer to it now… a stripping bare of what felt like lifetimes of crap. And now, it is years later and the journey continues….

I awoke in the middle of the night last week and sat upright with a line to a David Whyte’s poem Sweet Darkness screaming in my head. Without waking up too much I reached for my pen by my bedside next to my dream journal. I scribbled it down and awoke the next morning to read, “Give up all other worlds except the one to which you belong”. I lay there ruminating with… what do I belong to, where do I belong, what is the truth of my belonging?

Then it was the New Moon and we did a ceremony… as I’ve done over and over again… writing new moon wishes. For I know in my gut that my deepest wish is for truth, no matter how dark and dirty it gets. But wishing does nothing for me., “I wish….” could and can be never ending. And early this morning I found this quote that I read to my yoga students (paraphrased):

“If only I could have but one wish granted, it would be to live in a world like this one at a time like the present with friends/family like the ones I have now and to be myself”

And I realize that this is my Truth…. to belong to what is, to belong to me, to belong to love, to belong to loving me, to belong to my body and its sensations without arguing them away, to belong to life, the earth and myself. To create my life and my world in a way that will never be perfect but will always feel perfect for me.

Imagine if as a child when we were presented with our birthday cake and told to blow out the candles and “make a wish” or in other words: “what do you want now that you don’t have? What do you want to be different about yourself or your life?” What if instead we were offered, “give thanks for something you love about yourself … for you are perfect just as you are”…. now that is a cake that I would want to eat!