Breath, Attention and Surrender
Breath
“Student, tell me, what is God?”
‘It is the breath inside the breath.”
Kabir
The constant rhythm of breathing in and out maintains an intersection with the Ground of Being,
a sense of interconnectedness and Nowness.
The Experience of Our Existence
What amplifies bodily awareness?
In her book, “The Grace of Dying”, Kathleen Dowling Singh focuses on terminal illness.
Are there other circumstances or experiences besides terminal illness and meditation practices
that can amplify mindbody awareness?
The Path Within to the Beyond
The Presence of MindBody Awareness and the integration of body and ego –
a remapping of the previous boundaries between mind and body.
Primal repression loosens as the boundary between mind and body fades.
This process explores and integrates the Ego.
Exploration and integration produces an expansion – of being, of awareness and of identity.
The Cathartic Catalysts
SURRENDER
‘Not my will, but thy will be done.’
Jesus of Nazreth
I always had trouble with the word surrender. A vivid childhood image of the cowboy on a horse pointing a gun at someone and saying, “Surrender” was an immediate reflexive reaction to the word. I had to create many different words to circumvent this image and finally settled on “Let it Be” – which was always accompanied by the melody of the infamous Beatles song drifting in and out of my inner hearing!
I also had an ongoing argument with the word ‘hope’ and had to invent other words to avoid the collision of hope with expectation. This became a balancing act, stemming from life experiences with estrangement. For me, Cynthia Bourgeault’s “mystical hope” was another word for Trust. Emily Dickinson, however, helped me “see” differently with her images of ‘a door ajar’ and ‘the little thing with feathers.” My door ajar replaced hope and I would be witness to the little thing with feathers flying in at most unexpected times with gratitude that would cover me and seep within. My door ajar enabled me to Trust with mystical hope.
And then, unannounced, my door ajar was flung wide open by a life happening. I was powerless as my “door ajar” swiftly transformed into a limitless, infinite, boundless space, catapulting me into simultaneous overwhelming sensations, emotions and thought. I was on the crest of a wave, travelling at the speed of light.
And I momentarily traveled Beyond
as I was
embraced by
and engulfed into Surrender.
My only recourse was
‘thy will be done’….intermingled with ‘what just happened?”
2024
I was laying on the treatment table and my osteopath,
a specialist in orofacial osteopathy, had just finished…
I thought.
Instead, reaching onto her desk, she said
“Wonder what would happen if you put this under that upper left canine tooth? Open your mouth and bite.”
A piece of dental articulation paper was inserted into my mouth and I bit down. Her hands were immediately palpating my head as I held this articulation paper
between my teeth.
“Oh my goodness. Your entire head just opened up!”
she exclaimed in shock. “What a surprise!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. In the world of the cranial osteopath, this was not only unexpected
but also a very welcome response.
I left her office at 3:30 in Santa Cruz to drive to the San Jose airport for my trip back to Phoenix. She told me to keep this tape hanging from my mouth on the trip home. The icepick, splinter pain in my jaw/face dissipated as I drove to San Jose. At 4:04 on the outskirts of San Jose, my bite shifted and my teeth occluded on the right side. With
a piece of dark blue tape hanging out of my mouth,
I returned a rental car, spent four hours in the San Jose airport, got a taxi and arrived home at 10:30 pm.
This ‘block’ lasted through the next day – far longer than
the anesthetic sphenopalatine 30-minute block
I had experienced three weeks ago in my ENT’s office.
This was September, 2024.
My mind was spinning backwards in time –
to 1977 and 1996.
My fifth appointment with my osteopath on this memorable day had begun by my reminding her how my chronic,
long-term facial/TMJ problem had begun in 1977 during
a routine dental examination – as well as the unusual circumstances that had exacerbated my case during an orthodontic procedure in 1996 – my previous ‘canine’ dental adventures with disastrous repercussions.
Reverberations, Rebound, Reactions
Listening and Hearing
AWARENESS
“Would she have done this had I told my story?”
Her listening continues to wrap me in a warm blanket
of being heard.
Within 8 days of using a ‘fabric concoction’ at this same location, my upper right molar (tooth #3) fractured.
“Was this ‘coincidence’? Or, is my body screaming
at all of us, showing us the way toward resolution?”
Unanswered questions.
My door ajar remains wide open. This ‘remedy’ works some of the time. The pain continues to assault every other day; my local osteopath has palpated this phenomenon that she experienced as well. There are no answers…yet.
Wondering and amazement.
I return to Santa Cruz on October 15.
I am able to sit with and in this pain much easier.
impermanence is foremost in my spirit
as I venture forward.
1977
My dentist, concerned about a ‘cloud’ on the routine
bite wing x-ray, had referred me to an endodontist
who ruled out a root issue with this left canine tooth.
My dentist gunned his drill a couple of times and the whirring sound entered my mouth as this tooth was ‘equilibrated’. He had decided I was clenching
and this was going to fix the problem.
The pain was immediate and electric,
a bolt of lightening shooting through my face.
I jumped and screamed.
The dentist was horrified and asked me if I had previous sinus surgery.
When I replied yes, he scolded me and said,
“You didn’t tell me you had sinus surgery!”
My response was immediate: “You didn’t ask!”
My family dentist was all to eager to pass me on to his colleague, an ‘equilibration’ dentist, a specialist in occlusal (bite) adjustment. I spent six weeks on the pain killer Percodan, in and out of the dental chair while my ‘bite’ was weekly adjusted with a drill whirring in my mouth The end result: more pain.
And thus began my five year dental saga, ending up
in the world of TMJ (temporomandibular joint) and
dental appliances, infamous in dental offices
and dental symposiums.
I quickly acquired the label of ‘complex case –
a chronic orofacial pain patient
…with no answers.
I had to quit teaching piano and could barely
take care of two young children.
My marriage was falling apart… along with me.
1996
It was only later that awareness creeped through my wide-open ‘door ajar’. A dawning realization that ‘thy will be done’ was actually surrender. This happening, over which there was no control, overpowered me.
….a very special condition of psychospiritual transformation.
‘To let go is to lose your foothold temporarily.
Not to let go is to lose your foothold forever.
Soren Kierkegaard
Attention
LaserLight
