1. Healthy children, families, communities, and ecological systems are the true measure of real wealth. 2. Mutual caring and support are the primary currency of healthy families and communities, and community is the key to economic security. (David Korten)
“All my life, I was a taker. I spent twenty years in prison. It was scary, but one day, I decided to become a giver instead. I didn’t have much to give, but I figured if I shared what I had, God would take care of the rest. Everything I’ve given has come back to me many times over.”
I don’t have all the answers. Nobody does. Our time in this world is limited and uncertain. It’s up to us to do what we can to make the world a better place for all those lives to come. We are all connected. Peace and love, Jordan
My anxiety was running a little high, but I had chosen this passage and even then, knew it was exactly where I wanted to be, on the edge of my mental comfort zone, with a tenuous hand hold on the sheer cliff of the present moment. I was learning to disengage from the intense ego-attachment that the mind feels for this body. This learning to let go is the basis for peace in life and death. Surgery, from this perspective, is an opportunity to practice a dress-rehearsal for death, and, to be more centered in life.
“First, relax and release your mind.” These words of advice from the 18th century Buddhist master, Patrul Rinpoche, are termed “pith instructions” to attain the state of complete peace and inner freedom. We all yearn for peace and freedom – individually, and globally. And while sometimes it may seem hopeless and overwhelming amidst the overwhelming tsunami of negativity that passes for “news”, I’d like to suggest that the first step is to practice relaxing and releasing our mind.
When we raise our own healing vibration through receiving acupuncture, we assist in raising the vibration of everyone else in the room, everyone we meet as we leave the building and walk down the street, everyone in the neighborhood, city, bioregion, continent, and beyond. All the more so when we consciously cultivate an intention around healing beyond our own mind-body-spirit, but also acknowledging the wider sphere of life.
One of the gifts of acupuncture is to bring that essential aliveness into focus – beyond all conceptual filters. We simply feel awake, renewed, fresh, a child of humanity. Separation between self and other vanishes and global healing, world peace, dawns in that very moment.
In my dream that night, I am holding a vajra‚ the symbol of enlightenment. I drop it by accident into the mud, and then quickly retrieve it, dipping it into a nearby waterfall. Once again the vajra shines. Innate purity is revealed. I hear a whisper: “This vajra mind is indestructible.” Don’t believe in ordinary conceptions. Question them again and again. Understand gross sense perception as just that. And ever look towards that which dwells beyond, the deathless.
