Teachings
Return... Return... Return to the Seat of Your Soul
After traveling and teaching for nine months, I retreated to Santa Fe for the summer and immersed myself in nature. When I was not in the garden turning the earth, I was walking the Borrego Trail in our local mountains. It was a time of reflection as this was the summer I celebrated my sixtieth birthday.
The Borrego Trail became a metaphor for my life. A circular path that traverses a mountain, crosses a creek, and then returns through a steep hollow to meet itself in a small meadow just before the trailhead.
When I began to make this almost daily walk, I thought I was preparing myself physically for the arduous journey into South East Asia this winter, as I would be trekking into several remote tribal villages in Laos and Northern Thailand to assess future educational and medical outreach programs as part of Link Hands for Humanity.
Instead, I made a review of forty years of teaching and realized that I was at the beginning of a new life cycle. I was going to take an almost forgotten trail in my life, a trail that beckoned me to leave the University of California at Berkeley at 19 to live in villages around the world in search of a deeper meaning in life. The mediocrity and misery of my suburban childhood had echoed in the halls of one of the most prestigious universities in the United States, driving me to reach beyond the textbook to answer my burning questions: what are the social structures of a humanistic based society? What is the nature of ecological co-existence on planet earth? How can we each preserve and learn from the integrity of the indigenous tribal cultures that blanket our earth?
My point of departure was the Mola on the Island of Fromentara, Spain. I lived in a 400-year-old mud farmhouse, bathed from water from a cistern, cooked on an open pit and slept on a straw mat. To see a doctor was half a day's travel by motorboat. Electricity had not coiled yet around our lives. In the midst of this simplicity and peace, I found brothers and sisters who like myself had left their homes in search of something different than the humdrum of their urban existence. Unlike myself, most had turned to drugs to find a window to view a different reality. Instead of finding answers to my burning questions, I found myself galvanized into action, as many of my fellow seekers were seriously ill from months of drug abuse. With no knowledge of medicine and doctors so far away, I turned to the Mola natives for their folk remedies. The farmhouse became a refuge. Home cooked meals and local herbs made in to an assortment of concoctions were the medicine. Days turned into months. My questions simmered on the back burner of my mind. The raw expression of human suffering filled every minute of my time.
When winter came I moved east with the sun, penetrating into Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and eventually India. Everywhere I went it was the same experience: seekers on the edge of personal destruction. I could say that I cooked my way around the world learning the simplest ways to heal.
When I arrived in India the sheer magnitude of human suffering was a tsunami that left me naked and vulnerable. I gave everything that I owned to the first beggars I met and retreated into a hotel room on the outskirts of Delhi. I called my father and asked him to send me an airline ticket to come home. I had exhausted my resources. My heart and pocket book were empty.
I returned to my suburban hell, questions unanswered. To give meaning to my existence, I started a small healing clinic using the resources gathered from two years of travel. I buried my Self in my work.
Alone with the artifice of purpose I struggled to regain my footing. I entered a faceless marriage with a childhood sweetheart, knowing that as I said, "until death do us part," I lied. The hole in my heart forged from that lie and the absence of intimacy with a community of seekers grew to desperate proportions, as I was starving for contact with my Self. I was willing to try anything that might awaken the sleeping passion of my soul.
It was in this vulnerable state that a neighbor invited me to meet her spiritual teacher; a renegade from a San Francisco based Gurjieff School. Thus, I formally began my study with spiritual teachers and mentors to become what I am today. I took a fork on the road. I took a fork that brought me this summer back to the trailhead of my youth.
I have been told that a book should be read twice, once in our "salad years" and once when we have matured. I think that the same applies to our lives. We need at least two chances at the possibility of living out the order of our destiny: the rocky loop that takes us off course to mature our hearts and the pathway that flows naturally from our soul.
If you were to have asked me several years ago how I thought the last stages of my life would look, I would have painted a picture much like the life of my Spiritual Mother and greatest teacher, Hilda Charlton. I would be teaching weekly classes of spiritual instruction, sharing healing and gathering my closest students in my home. This was a life I shared with Hilda for twelve years in her New York apartment on 102nd and West End, a fifth floor gateway to heaven.
During those years of intensely loving instruction, I had no idea that I would meet myself at the trailhead of forty years ago, that I would traverse time back to the villages in the intimate and remote parts of the body of Mother Earth, living as a small part of the answers to those burning questions of my youth, taking even greater risks to love, share and help sustain the precious resources of Her creation. I would have never known that forty years of spiritual instruction and teaching was my rocky trail, and that at fifty-nine I would take "my road less traveled," that I would awaken from hibernation, living my passion for social justice and sustainable living systems.
In awakening, I recognize that I am responsible for the heritage passed to me by my beloved teachers. I recognize that to rediscover my trail does not mean jettisoning my life. As a result of those forty years, I have become a village granary, a seed saver of spiritual and healing heritages. Most seeds I have not actually planted but have kept safely in my heart until the time that I was mature enough to pass them on to the rightful guardians, passing them without the GMO stamp of ego. I have waited forty years as my spiritual mother, Hilda, instructed me, hidden in the ground of anonymity so that I would properly germinate.
Today I gather friends, beloveds and family on a Journey to pass the living heritage of my teachers, so the sacred seed can multiply and diversify within the hearts of those who dare to love, seeds that may germinate along the trails of your lives.
Each may ask if they are on their "road less traveled." Each may ask if they are moving along the path that flows naturally from their soul.
May we rejoice as we discover our own Borrego trails.
With love and thankfulness for the experience of a life filled with your love,
Nura