Paying for your Meds

One of the fallout ideas from these last few weeks of trainings and
studies -- first with the Grandmother in New York, secondly with a
foreign-tongued Goenkaji in Dholka, and most recently with Sri
Mukeshanandji at the Santaram Mandir in Nadiad -- was some clarity on
this idea of meditation, gathering, reflection, and fees.

To collect myself, some points of preface

1. Part of what I realized with Mukeshji and the Ramana Maharshi
meditations, part of what I realized listening to my heart and
attempting this act of submission to the Oversoul as Guru, is that all
these amazing Revelations, Ideas, Visions, and Poetry with which I'm
blessed during my supposed meditations are actually (wouldn't you
know) distractions from What's Really Going On, and my attachment to
them (and boy am I attached) is holding me -- back I wont say -- but
holding me to Where It Is I Am. Not for better nor worse, but for what
it is (what it is).

2. It does feel good to have answered the dream -- to have listened to
the Master who told me (the night before I booked my ticket for India,
I believe, sometime in October), when I rose my meditative posture
because I felt something had gone terribly wrong, and went up to the
Master for advice to reveal to him my understanding -- the Master who
opened his eyes and sterned at me "You Need Training". I feel like,
explicity, that's what I've been doing the last couple of weeks, and
what I will continue, in a different form, today, as my flute practice
starts anew.

3. In the practice and history of Reiki there is a telling that the
Master (Usui) came down from the mountain blessed with this amazing
prana-shakti gift of being able to heal people at will, and good
Christian that he was, immediately went into the lepers quarter filled
with the listless and begging, to heal out of the goodness and warmth
of his soul. In typical protestant-myth style, the lazy beggers,
though healed of their afflication, continued to be a curse to society
and changed not their lifestyles a whit.
Now, political context and moralizing aside, the key takeaway for
Reiki is that you're supposed always to charge for instructions. Seems
like a bit of a complicated plot -- at times -- to me, but I take the
point that it helps motivation sometimes to charge for a godly
service. Why that charge should have any relation to the spectacular
economy of sin and despair is beyond me...

Now then.

I went to meditate at a house in Santa Clara a few months ago, having
just returned from India and in need of some brown faces. It was
organized by Brother Nippun, Sister Guri, and family -- a beauty
weekly Wednesday event of an hour of silent meditation followed by an
hour of silent dinner, all provided as a gift to the public that the
world may have peace. The whole energy -- the event, the humans, the
Gujarati food, the openness -- was so beautiful I immediately decided
to flatter it by starting the same practice in Sequim, and from the
first week I was there we did a similar thing, every Tuesday at 19h00,
which I think still continues on license from the snow, under the
casual direction of my mother and Neilu Auntie (as she is known here
in Kerala).

And everywhere I go, now, for some reason, people are asking me to
"teach" them to meditate (as if they don't already know) which I
interpret as code for "be an excuse for us to carve out some silence".
Which I'm happy to do as I need such as excuses as much as the next
human. And it occured to me, during this Vipassana time when I should
have been submitting my mind and casual thoughts to The Great Beyond,
that I should charge. I should charge a commitment that each person
with whom we sit in this manner should hold a sort of open meditation
event in their personal space, inviting at least other person and
perhaps many more, preparing a dinner, accepting no offerings, and
serving the stillness and sustenance in silence. And then sending me
(or Neilu) (or Nippun) (or Goenkaji) (or Jesus) a postcard.

So there's that. It's a way of changing the world almost as easy as
wrapping all your holiday presents in cloth instead of paper, a la
ancient Japanese and the contemporary Nobel laureate Ms. Wangari
Maathai.