What do you invest your life in?

My dearest friend for 27 years died this week after a very short illness.  I'm very glad that her illness was so short, for her sake, but have struggled with the huge hole in my heart.  Such a loss, such an angel she has been.  The outpouring of support and affection for her, and for her husband and two daughters, has belied the fear that some of my clients have: why should I spend my life being a good person?  No one will care or remember me.  If you pour good wine into a golden goblet, it will taste ambrosial.  If you pour good wine into a peeling vessel, or one with holes, you'll end up with nothing. It's not being good, kind and generous that is sometimes wasted; it's continuing to pour your good wine into rubbishy glasses that is the potential problem.  So stop wasting time with biological relations who aren't good, kind and generous, even if they are your descendants.  Spend your time exclusively with good people.

The Dhammapada tells us that what we surround ourselves is what we ourselves become, so surround yourself with the good and virtuous.

I loved Cindi Johnson because she was so lovable: kind, generous, funny, smart, tenacious, dedicated to her remedial college math students (how many lives did she save by helping low-income kids get their AA and start a career-track?) and always ready to open her heart.  But I really loved her because of who I became, year by year, because of her.  At my wedding, where she was matron of honor, I told my assembled friends that I was the person I was because they had honed me and shaped me, year by year, like you create a sparkling gem from an unprepossessing stone.  To the extent that I am good and virtuous, it is because I surrounded myself with the good and virtuous, and walked away from the mean and selfish.

I will miss Cindi at one level or another until the day I die.  And her legacy is much, much more than just three grandchildren.  Her legacy is also the array of sparkling gems that her life honed and polished, all the lives that deviated from their course and moved closer to goodness and virtue.

Every faith and wisdom tradition on earth, now and in the past, extols the value of one precious gem vs. a pile of junk-stuff, and the value of one good person to change the world.  They were right.  I was blessed by this good woman's life for 27 years.  There is no greater epitaph for a life.

Soar With Dragons to Genuine Joy (part 2)

In the first part of this exploration, I recommended learning new things, exploring creating things and slowing down to the point where you can actually experience the world you live in.  Today I want to look at some examples of joy that came to me like a bolt from the heavens - unplanned, unexpected and amazing.

It was almost two decades ago, and a Russian colleague was visiting Silicon Valley to share best practices on the use of technology in education.  At that time, I was director of a university extension program in network management. [Too true.  Before I saw the light and switched to healing minds and bodies, I used to teach network engineering.  My first published book, by Prentice-Hall was titled Networking and Data Communications and was the first readable tutorial on LAN technology ever published.  For your homework assignment, research how long ago that was and DON’T TELL ANYONE!]

I was in a major-league funk, not whining about anything, just much more subdued than usual, in a serious crisis of confidence.  He noticed that I wasn’t my usual sunny self, nagged me to tell him why, and I gave him the 20-words-or-less version of What Wasn’t Working in My Life.  I’ll never forget his words, because they not only brought me out of my funk, they have sustained me for two decades.  He said, “Remember: you are the beloved child of God.”

Not so extraordinary, you say?  Well, consider this: I don’t think he believes in God.  I know I don’t and never did.  While I’m a very spiritual and religious person, my faith doesn’t have a First Cause (God/Creator being).  The universe follows laws and arose however Stephen Hawking and his colleagues say it does and did.  We Buddhists don’t care.  Religion is about ethics, conscience, love, honor, transcendence and the meaning of our human lives, all the things that chemistry and physics and biology can’t create experiments to study.  But what my colleague was saying wasn’t about the simplistic definition of God as creator being.  He meant God as a word that equals “the spirit of love that animates the universe,” which the Upanishads, humanity oldest literature, says is the axis that all matter revolves around.  Every faith I’ve ever studied sees that three-letter word as denoting a concept or an energy, not an actual being.  What he was really saying was “Victoria, it’s just a trough in the overall arc of a good person’s life.  The universe still rotates on an axis of pure love.  See that.  Don’t forget it.”

Seeing to the heart of what he was communicating transformed my whole conceptualization of what my life was about and what my response to the latest life-insult [a serious health issue] should be.

Fast forward to two years ago, when I was spending four days above the Arctic Circle in mid-winter, and it was every bit as icy cold from 10PM to 5AM as you are envisioning – times twelve.  The auroras were glorious; I could feel those magnetic fields resonating in my soul.  They danced their sparkling dance across a sky blazing with starlight. 

I noticed a Japanese woman who was traveling alone and reached out to try to share the experience, but her English was poor and I wasn’t pronouncing my 7 words of Japanese correctly.  So I held her hand, shared some reiki, and crocheted her a scarf, with reiki symbols in them, so they would continue to create a channel through me to her even after we all went on our ways.  So few words.  But the channel was profound.  We stayed in touch, she continued to study English.  Today, she is marvelously fluent, I’ve learned to pronounce better and we are doing wonderful spiritual healing work together. [If you can read Japanese, find Wami Amami online and sign up to work with her.]

We can find joy, we can find wisdom and we can find deep connection with unfamiliar words and with no words at all.  Joy can flow down like a mighty river into our unsuspecting souls, if we open ourselves to it.  I hope you will.

Bio: Victoria Leo offers both science-based and spiritual solutions that really work! Visit www.soaringdragon.biz and choose the program that will transform your life.  You deserve to soar with dragons! Victoria’s Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies welcomes you, as does her blog SoaringDragoninJapan.blogspot.com. You can find her books on Amazon or at your local bookseller.