Wake Up Call

“While Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters
Sons of bankers, sons of lawyers
Turn around and say good morning to the night
For unless they see the sky
But they can’t and that is why
They know not if it’s dark outside or light”

Lyrics: Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, Bernie Taupin / Elton John

Some personal experiences cannot be readily explained using any standard, textbook theories. Experiences of this category seem to fly-in-the-face of accepted scientific explanations and elude measurable ways to quantify them.

This does not mean they are not important…

She started receiving strange messages upon awakening, as if someone, in the room with her, had spoken a phrase or words into her ear. This would cause her to sit up, startled and blinking, scanning the room for the friend or stranger who had spoken, and calling out, only to find nobody was there.

Well, this kind of freaked her out…

Ever since her dreams started becoming more and more vivid and detailed she’d been having unusual experiences in both her dreaming and waking life. She’d always been what she called “intuitive” but that ability seemed to be quickening. It seemed to be awakening to new levels.

She’d weaned herself off the anti-depressants with great difficulty…in some ways it was harder to do than when she went, cold turkey, off of the Rx painkillers she’d become addicted to a few years earlier. Yes, the anti-depression medication seemed to temporarily bring on some higher levels of dreaming but other than that there were no real detectable benefits to taking them. She certainly did not feel any less depressed. And they were not inexpensive. So after a few unsuccessful tries going off them using the tapering method her doctor recommended she had to resort to cutting her pills into tiny slices and then weaning off a slice less every week. It was the only way she found she could avoid the side-effects which included confusion, dizziness and strange tinnitus/buzzing in her ears.

Even after successfully going off of the meds her dreams remained forever changed. They were heightened and brightened and detailed in new ways and just different.

One morning, when she was feeling particularly low, she awakened to a voice and the message spoken was urgent and clear.

The phrase was, “SPIRITUALLY BANKRUPT”.

What?

She was alone in her apartment at the time. Her son was on the road with his backpack and his hippie friends, sleeping under bridges and going to Rainbow Gatherings and her ex-boyfriend/roomate had left months ago, disgusted, (with good reason) while she was still in the throes of her pain killer, love-affair.

Yet somehow she knew that the words were true. She WAS “spiritually bankrupt”…she’d actually given some renewed thought to her spiritual views and where, perhaps she might pick up where she’d left off…way back in her teen years. But she’d gotten sidetracked, distracted, overworked, busy and spirituality seemed to always get left by the wayside.

“Spirituality” in her realm, had nothing to do with “religion” or the dogma of Christianity or other similar doctrines. She’d grown up in a Christian cult, of sorts, that’s what she had decided Jehovah’s Witnesses were, and when she left home at 17 she left that religion along with any formal spiritual beliefs. She tended to give a cursory nod to other people’s spiritual beliefs and even studied some indigenous religions but never again embraced anything tangible for herself.

She raised her son to respect everyone’s spiritual beliefs but to be wary of embracing any for himself since they all seem to come along with the dogma that was clearly to be avoided.

But she felt like a spiritual person.

Mostly when she was in nature or gardening or creating art or playing with her son when he was a baby. When she was pregnant and later nursing and raising her baby she felt highly in tune with some sort of unnameable spiritual system. She called it the “spirit of nature” and the “spirit that surrounds us all” but she avoided going any deeper than that.

“Religion is a trap and pablum for the meager-minded masses,” was how she described it to herself and others. So she pushed back and avoided all conversation about religion and spirituality.

But after the “Spiritually Bankrupt” message she received in her 40s she felt compelled to take action.

She tumbled out of bed and into the shower and then grabbing her coffee cup, pondering the message she’d received and how to address it (or not). After walking a block to her favorite coffee hut she ordered the usual Americano and settled in with some Sudoku and to listen to the conversation swirling around her. The customers there were mostly familiar presences and she enjoyed this hour or so of brief touch-in with the colorful neighborhood characters before retreating, again, to the solitude of her consulting work, alone, in her apartment with only her computer for company.

There was currently a guy named Jamie hanging out at the coffee shop.  He was quite a bit younger than herself, and he seemed pretty intelligent and engaging and she enjoyed regular conversations with him. That morning he showed up shortly after she did and asked if he could sit at her table. It was a Sunday and he told her he enjoyed going to the local Buddhist Temple for the Thai services because not only were they in a foreign language, which he found rather comforting, but most of the best Thai restaurant owners in town attended that afternoon meditation and they hosted a potluck afterwards.

Haha!

He invited her along saying that nobody would expect them, being single, to bring anything. (Okay, she thought. She was game…this was worth a try once, at least.)

So she did something she had never done before and headed off to the Buddhist Temple with Jamie…

The first thing she noticed about the Temple was that the energy of the whole place and everyone in it felt so calm and clear. This was such a relief to her. She’d been getting more and more sensitive to energy and did not even realize most of the time how bombarded by everything that she felt.

So hurrah for the calmness…bring it on!

The second thing she noticed was how wonderful it was to sit during the Thai ceremony where the monks were chanting in a foreign language she did not understand. This allowed her to just sink into the calm energy and let her brain disconnect (not an easy feat!) because there were not any words or thoughts to hang onto.

As a total washout in previous attempts she’d made trying to meditate this was quite an epiphany for her and added some new food for thought AND the Thai food feast after the Buddhist services was totally amazing, as promised.

In an attempt to try to bring more meditation and peace into her personal life she was inspired to create a small altar at the entrance to her apartment. She obtained a rather gaudy, fat, golden Ho Tai Buddha figurine and set it on a small, antique table with a little bowl for offerings. There were two candles flanking the Buddha and a spot for burning incense. She made a regular routine out of bringing cut flowers back from her morning walks to place as offerings upon the new altar.

With no intention of becoming a Buddhist or aspiring to those doctrines she intended, instead, to learn what she could from the useful tools that tradition offered, leaving any dogma by the wayside.

She found her mind was way too full and busy, so she sought other ways to calm herself. All attempts to shut things down were fruitless so she turned to other ways to bring herself from agitation into calmness. One way she discovered she could do this was by chanting mantras. This partly came through her experiences at the Buddhist Temple when she realized that the nonsensical, foreign words chanted by the priests seemed to calm her mind.

So she started learning some basic chants and purchased some CDs to chant along with.

Om Mani Padme Hum

Namo Guan Shi Yin Pusa

Om Tare Tu Tare Tuttare Soha

And this is when her new journey into spiritual awakening started…