OM MANI PADME HUM
“the jewel of the
lotus is in the heart consciousness”
OM: represents
generosity/ purifies pride/ ego, color is white/ trait is wisdom
Do you remember the number of beliefs you let go as you grew
older and began to organize the world around systems not of your choosing? The most interesting aspect of choice is not
that we can choose, but from where do we believe we make choices. What I’ve
learned most in the last year is the number of ways I reorganized my world to
match the world around me like medical text books where the transparent layer
of the body is laid upon a foundational mapping lining up the circuitry:
Nerves, muscles, skeleton. I tried to
lay down in the outline assigned to me and keep within the parameters which I
read as a type of safe, which I let fear read to me as a type of safe. I never
understood why I was a poet, but poet is another four letter word that can hold
you.
SANSKRIT HAS 96 WORDS FOR LOVE
I was writing a book about attachment and romantic love, and
for some reason it wasn’t evolving: There is a bottom to grief, but how to not
land there permanently. I was meditating
daily and doing yoga nidra and for some reason signed on to do a Reiki 1
training class. At some point when suffering, you hit a point where you submit
because you have nothing else to lose. I learned this at 25 in rehab in one
sphere and again at 39. Life spirals as much as we attempt to linear it. After
my first Reiki training, I weaned off of antidepressants that I had been taking
for over a decade for suicidal depression. This isn’t about medication or
mental illness as much as it is a story about how patterns can be traced. For
six weeks after Reiki 1, we were encouraged to meditate, chant, cut cords and
practice self Reiki at least once if not twice a day. Thanksgiving fell shortly
after I completed training, and I spent the day alone writing and meditating.
As I sat at the table, this poem came out of me changing the whole shape of the
book. After I wrote it, my entire body broke out in a damp sweat, and I was
sobbing hysterically. Sometimes, we hold things inside of us. I say sometimes
but what I mean is all times. All times we hold inside of us what we barely
know.
break
against
image of my brother’s head blown to
bits
way a skull can’t contain what we are
way bones splinter and fragment
like a stone covered in cuneiform
speaks to us across time, how you will
save yourself
heart’s seat, indestructible drop
how quickly you flew from us, birded
skull threaded in a womb where I too
was threaded
lacuna in a life sentence
and then here too, firstly to step
beyond this veil
and hold us as we come along
back & forth: souls
crossing near enough to touch
when you look into that book, can you
read
what is written, can you see
last time I saw you
my anger kept me from speaking
I am lost, can you find me
I can’t tell whose grief
there is so much illusion
how can I ever hook you
I did not love you well in this world
my brother I did not know how to love
and I do not know why I can forgive you
anything
but I cannot forgive myself
MA:
represents ethics/ purifies jealousy/ color is green/ trait is compassion
Because I was writing about attachment,
I tried an experiment of sleeping with strangers to observe how I attached to
other people. I watch myself sometimes make these decisions cloaked in the veil
of “art,” and I marvel at the fiction of safe it provides. I told myself I was
doing this Reiki stuff in the same vein: Learning a new skill for writing my
book. See how we slip accountability. I invited a man over I had never met and
after we had sex, he told me suddenly that his mom had committed suicide and he
found the body. He told me she had taken drugs he kept in the house, and it was
his fault. What I haven’t told you yet reader is what I am. I call myself a
poet.
The BHAGAVAD
GITA is a love story told on a battlefield; for how else does one approach
questions of faith?
When I was younger, I could see clearly
into people. I grew up in a house of secrets where the adults said one thing but
the truth was different: I learned there are two worlds, the world said out loud
and the world underneath where the truth lies. If you know things you can’t
explain, it scares people. If you can read people’s intentions and energy and
feelings, it scares people. If you know what comes next, it scares people. I
spent all of my childhood learning to be a safe person, shutting out and turning
down the volume of what came through; and then I learned to be a poet. To slip
what lies in the underneath into a container called language, called art: I
learned how to survive by defining what I am as an artist and then I couldn’t
stop. I’m an addict.
When this stranger told me that story,
I realized two truths: It was not his fault and it was not my fault my brother
killed himself. Being a poet didn’t mean I had the words to save him. Knowing
he was going to die didn’t mean I had tools to divert his path. This isn’t a
story about suicide. It’s about patterns. If you watch close, life folds and if
you mark the creases, you witness how the story keeps at it till you see. How
quickly do you want to surface?
Megan: I thought, don’t do this. Then I
did. I put my head against his heart chakra and I listened, I asked his dead to
speak to me. I invited in suffering: chalice, vessel, channel.
Two weeks later, he told me he loved
me. Then he abruptly left the city and moved to Florida. He met another woman
and fell in love. All of this is coincidence, perhaps. When we broke contact, I
texted him and said: You should know it’s not your fault. We don’t have that
kind of power over others. We can’t keep them here. I wonder often when I speak
or write, to whom am I talking? And it makes sense to me that we are all the
same, because most of what comes out is meant for me. For you. For us.
NI: represents patience/ purifies desire/ color
is yellow/ trait of mind/ body/ speech/ action
I realized in Reiki II training how
much intuition I had let waste away. I ignored my instinct and used reason to
make choices, to keep safe. I invested in being helpless, powerless and let
others take care of me. I was suicidal and sad from a very young age, so I
thought this is I. This is normal. It never occurred to me, and I was never
taught that what I was doing was absorbing what was around me, that I was born
into generations of suffering and abuse and addiction. I thought I was the entire
puzzle missing a piece. But I was just one piece. I began to see the story of
my brother and me in a very particular way, and to understand it you would have
to know how often we spoke of death. You would have to know what it feels like
to have no fear of death.
The story fits on top of other stories;
it is not new. It is a spiral; we are caught in its net. Once upon a time there
was a sister and a brother who chose to come into the world together, one was a
receiver and one was a transmitter. In order to shift great amounts of energy,
a sacrifice is required. We can’t undergo great change without letting go of
all we knew before, except by not being afraid to give up all of it: All that
we love and all that we hate. Duality itself is what we sacrifice, and that is
the trickiness of it. When my brother suicided, he set in motion a choice to go
on one side of the veil and I set in motion an intention to find him. This is
how channeling works: You have to be able to lock onto a reception. You have to
be able to find a transmitter, blood of my blood, DNA of my DNA, memory to my
memory as much myself as I am, I would know you anywhere. I would find you
anywhere in all that can be imagined. And here we are?
The Egyptian myth of Isis is a story
about a sister who goes into the underworld to bring her brother/ husband
Osiris back. Isis is framed as a great healer, champion to women and children;
she is a channel ferrying between death and life; so we, so we.
PAD:
represents diligence/ purifies ignorance/ color is blue/ trait is equanimity
I thought I was losing my mind. There
have been times like this in my life. The best way I can describe it is as though
being unplugged like in The Matrix.
It’s watching the world around you, but it registers different as a code
perhaps more than as a coherent space.
I started doing this meditation where I
visualized going down 108 steps, one step for each breath where I could think of
nothing more than the numbered step I was on in that breath. If I lost count, I
stopped and got off the mat. It took weeks to get down to 108 without losing
concentration and then when I reached the bottom I realized I had no idea what
to do once I got there.
Inanna goes into the underworld to meet
her sister, and she is required to hang her skin on a hook. These myths, these
stories, they are guidebooks for travel. You must learn to remove your skin, to
find the hook, to hang your skin on the hook once you reach the bottom of the
stairs. You must not be afraid that you will not be able to put your skin back
on once you are ready to ascend. Who would choose this?
ME:
represents renunciation/ purifies greed/ possessiveness/ color is red/ trait is
bliss
Each chakra of the body has a specific
megahertz at which it resonates; the chakra can be balanced simply by listening
to the vibrational sound. What is the function of sound? Why speak? Why
poet? Often when the dead speak to me it
is just an echo, a whisper; and other times
I speak out loud and realize I am not talking to no one, that in fact I
am not talking but being talked to about what I need to see. Sound moves around
us, vibrations of energy make us a never type of alone, but oh, I hunger for
touch. It is a lonely life to be
populated by sound, to be haunted and distracted by unsaid.
HUM:
represents wisdom/ purifies aggression/hate / color is black/ trait is
compassion
I read a description of grief by
William Dadarrio last night in his book,
To Grieve, in which he stated that love
felt during grief is like a lighthouse shining the way to point out that there
is danger but not able to navigate the ship for you. Grief is like that, a body
of water you must traverse and no matter how many maps you consult, the truth
is the journey has never been taken until you take it. That is the sacred key
of life, for all the same stories, there is only the journey of you in the
traveling. Around us, we choose to see and heed the lights shining on us great
warnings, great desire for our safe passage, but whom do we champion to steer? I
poet because of all the sounds I can create, there will always be a last sound.
That is the only light I have to keep in line of sight: To let go in love.
Which word will I choose of all the words for love when it is time to say:
Farewell for now. Om Mani Padme Hum.
It is very good to recite the mantra Om mani padme hum, but while you are doing it, you should be thinking on its meaning, for the meaning of the six syllables is great and vast …. The first, OM … symbolizes the practitioner’s impure body, speech, and mind; it also symbolizes the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha…. The path is indicated by the next four syllables. MANI, meaning jewel, symbolizes the … altruistic intention to become enlightened, compassionate and loving…. The two syllables, PADME, meaning lotus, symbolize wisdom…. Purity must be achieved by an indivisible unity of method and wisdom, symbolized by the final syllable HUM, which indicates indivisibility…. Thus the six syllables, om mani padme hum, mean that in dependence on the practice of a path which is an indivisible union of method and wisdom, you can transform your impure body, speech, and mind into the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha….
— His Holiness the Dalai Lama
