Earthlines Summer 2011 May Suffering Be Transformed

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My teacher of Gestalt Awareness Practice, Christine Stewart Price, accompanied me to the women's prison in Chowchilla earlier this month. It was deeply satisfying to share my dear friend and mentor with the inmates involved with the Lioness Tale Prison Project, women who are breaking down the bars of their internal prison even as they meet the challenges of their external one with deepening freedom. So many of the tools I have learned through my years of working with Chris are integrated now in the LiT-uPP prison program.

After a profoundly moving day with the inmates, Chris left the prison on Wednesday to return home. I continued into Thursday with private one-on-one sessions and then drove several hours to Chris' where I would participate in a two day workshop at her place overlooking the Big Sur coast. I slept that night in her beautiful glassed in sunroom.

As I wake the fog is floating over the ridge tops, a little blue sky showing through the misting clouds, spots of sun concentrated on the hillsides. The leaves fluttering on the cottonwood tree just outside the window remind me of small fish swinging their tails in the current of a stream. I am the fish swaying in the water and I am the water. I am the leaves moved by the wind and I am the wind that moves me. This is my experience as I awaken- looking, listening, breathing.

I feel into the hearts and minds of the women who are doing life prison sentences. I know it is through Silence- through contacting Ground, Wind, Spaciousness- that I can know our common humanity, touch our shared divinity and experience our deep communion with one another. I breathe using an ancient Buddhist practice called Tonglen, a practice I first learned from Chris Price. I breathe first for myself, for my own imprisoning fears, anger and powerlessness. I breathe in its constricting darkness. I breathe out spaciousness and light. I breathe with each of the LiT-uPP women. I breathe in their pain and suffering. I breathe out healing, freedom and help. I breathe with all the people who are living in prisons right now everywhere in the world; I breathe with all the people who have been imprisoned down through the passageways of time; I breathe with all the people who will experience this oppression in the future. I breathe into the freedom that will undo the chains. I breathe into the spacious love of our true nature.

gazabo
My early morning contemplation ends with this inner guidance:
"Don't do more.
Do less.
Go to the silence.
Rest in natural great peace."

Others now join me in the sunroom as we gather to meditate as a group. Serendipitously Chris suggests Tonglen for our morning meditation. And so we begin: breathing in, breathing out. Breathing in the dark, the heavy, the thick; breathing out the light, the spacious, the clear. Eventually Chris invites Beth to close our sitting with this prayer from her Tibetan Buddhist teacher:

Through the power
of this compassionate practice
may suffering be trasformed into peace.
May the hearts of all beings open
and their wisdom radiate from within.

Amen. So Be It.

©Diane Pendola, Summer 2011. You are welcome to print or make a copy in electronic form for personal use or sharing with interested persons as long as the copyright notice is not removed or altered. Please do not print it in any other publication, or sell it, by itself or as part of another work, without express written permission of the author.

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