PART III
THE BLAZING FIERCE CHATRAL RINPOCHE
I had encounters with Chatral Rinpoche in Bodhanath in 1989. When I arrived at the newly consecrated Dudjom temple, I was aware that Chatral Rinpoche had overseen the construction and art work. He was one of the most eminent of all Nyingma lamas and he was Dudjom Rinpoche’s regent. When I entered the temple, the day before the Dudjom ku dung arrived, Chatral Rinpoche was seated in the highest throne in the assembly, leading a haunting ceremony. His power was evident.
That evening Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche sat next to him on an equal throne, preparing for the Dudjom ku dung with continuing ceremony, shifting chanting rhythms and tones. Sometimes there was powerful music, several kinds of drums, cymbals, and the remarkable array of Nyingma trumpets, the largest ones nine feet long. The sound was awesome, haunting, powerful. Blows the mind away.
Chatral Rinpoche was known to be fierce. He was about 6 feet tall, wearing maroon and gold robes, with a big shock of white beard extending from his lower face, his white hair cropped short on top. A member of our Dudjom sangha from New York, David Lewis, had been in Bodhanath for a month and had managed to press through get to Chatral Rinpoche and ask him for teachings, as David told me the story. Rinpoche said to him, “Teachings? Not even the Tibetans understand the Dharma anymore. Go home and study Christianity.” And he strongly gestured David to leave.
As I stayed around the Dudjom temple after the ku dung was installed I became friends with the eldest of the tulkus that were in training there, a handsome 23 year who spoke English well, Jigme Rinpoche. He called me a lama. I asked him seriously to not say that again around the American Dudjom sangha or they’d kill me because there’s already so much jealousy. He said I had to have an interview with Chatral Rinpoche and that he’d arrange it. I said he threw David Lewis out. Jigme said, “He didn’t come in the right way.”
Jigme Rinpoche did arrange an interview for me with Chatral Rinpoche. Jigme sent me to him with a translator and a letter. Chatral Rinpoche was told that I had completed both the Kargu and Nyingma foundation practices and many bhumes (hundred thousands) of the Dudjom Vajrakilaya mantra. He accepted me and blessed a phurba and several ritual objects I’d brought from the marketplace. I told him I was going to do one week of retreat in my hotel room. He said to come and see him after the retreat and he’d give me teachings.
During my retreat Chatral Rinpoche came to me twice from within in a wrathful lama form. That week in my hotel room was deep for me, as ever working through the stresses and dangers of our age. I ended the retreat at 5pm on the seventh day and went to the great stupa to circumambulate and figure out how to get to see Chatral Rinpoche again in the three days I had left. It really had to happen the next day. But he lived in Parping, at the Vajrakilaya cave, 15 miles from where I was and I wasn’t sure how to reach him.
As I entered the plaza that surrounds the great stupa I noticed something unusual. A car was in the plaza and some people had gathered around it. I went up and looked in. It was Chatral Rinpoche! He was out for a ride. He saw me. I told one of his attendants who spoke a little English that Rinpoche had invited me back to see him and I was planning to go out to Parping 10am the following morning.
He said it was a good thing they had bumped into me because Rinpoche wouldn’t be there then. He spoke to Chatral Rinpoche. Come at 4pm he said. I said good. I stepped back, turned away, walked a few steps and then looked back, but the car was gone. People were dispersed. It had a magical quality.
Parping was fascinating. I’ve never seen such striking forms of rock and trees. Chatral Rinpoche had built a little temple right next to the cave in which Guru Rinpoche practiced Vajrakilaya and achieved complete realization before bringing the Buddhist teachings to Tibet. The Hindus have worked bright red and orange dyes into the rock forms here and there, some kind of sacred markings. Inside Chatral Rinpoche’s room in his little temple I again had the excellent translator Jigme Kunsang.
I told Rinpoche of my two visions of him. He took that as a sign to give me a transmission of the complete Dudjom Vajrakilaya and Dorje Drollod termas. He asked an attendant lama for volume 15 from his library of Dudjom termas. He then held it to my head and poured in a long, unforgettable transmission. Afterwards Jigme Kunzang and other lamas present were somewhat aroused. “That was most unusual,” Pema Kunzang said as we left.
In 1991 I returned for several reasons, large among them being to see Chatral Rinpoche again and speak to him about Medigrace. I was again able to have Jigme Kunsang as translator. He himself lived in Parping, in a family of practitioners, and was a student of Chatral Rinpoche. He often served as translator. Jigme was also very handsome, and he somehow got chosen to play a good part in the movie Little Buddha. Chatral Rinpoche was a rare surviving big buddha, and it was great to be with him again.
Jigme briefed Rinpoche about the transmissions he had given me two years ago. Then I started to tell Chatral Rinpoche about my aspirations with Medigrace, my desire to use meditation as medicine. I said I was also concerned that I might be heading into a big ego trip. I asked him to look into it and if it was an ego trip I asked him to cut my head off.
He spoke without hesitation in a declaration of primordial wisdom. He said, “The medicine you are developing is good. It will benefit countless people and benefit the lives of many Tibetan lamas”. He then asked me if the world was threatened by infectious air-borne tuberculosis bacteria. I said I didn’t know but I thought it was possible that the airborn TB could exist, and I thought that medicine could overcome it. Yet at the same time I knew that medicine had failed at stopping AIDS.
So Chatral Rinpoche did see good in Medigrace. The next day I saw him again, with two Drollod phurbas for him to bless. He blessed them holding them in my hand with his hand. He gave me some specific teaching, and then said he was tired. I left, and would never see him again, but as with Khyentse Rinpoche, seeing him again had been wish-fulfilling.
THE CHALLENGE OF THE MONKEYS AT SWIAMBU
On my first visit to Nepal at some point my close friend Mike Helfgot said, “I’ve got to go back to Swiambu, for a couple of reasons. I love it. It’s unforgettable, and also it was on that mountain that I first took refuge in the Dharma, with Drupthrop Rinpoche. He had a little temple there. He’s probably not there now, but you want to go to Swiambu. It’s the second great stupa.”
And so we went, with Nina Reznick, Carol Berg, and David Frank. If you were looking at the Kathmandu Valley from a mountain, like Namo Buddha, you see a large valley extending right up to a legendary range of Himalaya mountains, with Mt. Everest downrange to your right, and magnificent Annapurna almost straight ahead. You’re looking right at the Western edge of Tibet, spectacular snow mountains up in the sky. In the center of the flat Kathmandu Valley is a small round mountain, like a breast, covered with trees. The top is the other great Buddhist stupa in Nepal, Swiambu, “The Inconceivable.” Both great stupas are more than 1000 years old.
There are two ways of ascending the mountain. We took the dramatic one, straight up 1000 stone steps to the towering symbol of the Buddha’s omniscience. The design of the stupa and the concourse around it were different than the great stupa in Boudhanath, 12 miles away, but there was no doubt that the presence of the two ancient Buddhist stupas in proximity drew Nyingma masters in their search for refuge.
Though Nepal was mainly Hindu, the nation was respectful and hospitable to the Tibetan refugees who settled there, letting them stay in Nepal and rebuild their temples. At Swaiambu there were Hindus appreciating the spectacular monument, there were many Buddhists, and some tourists, and there were monkeys, big grey ones, mostly staying quiet, on the lower parts of the stupa and all around the grounds, seemingly at ease with each other and the walking people. But being surrounded by big gray monkeys made me alert.
There were various shops around the stupa grounds, and Mike suggested that we buy fruit as offerings just in case we did find Drupthrup Rinpoche in his little temple. We bought three plastic sacks full of bananas, oranges, and apples, got directions from some monks who spoke English, and headed off in the direction of Drupthop Rinpoche’s little temple on the side of the mountain. The monks warned us that he was rarely there, but off we went, supporting Mike in his quest to reconnect with his refuge lama.
As we got further from the stupa we got less certain of our direction, when suddenly, out of the blue, we got hit by a group of bandit monkeys. In a flash they had slashed all three of our plastic sacks of fruit, sending the fruits bouncing and rolling with the monkeys grabbing them. Mike, David, and Carol were stunned, but I didn’t hesitate to let out a roar and charge the monkeys, kicking and raging at them and managing to get back about half of our fruit. My friends were shocked and amused. I stood over the remaining fruit and shouted one last time as the beasts made away with half of it.
We gathered together our half and set off again to find Mike’s refuge lama. We needed directions again and were again warned that he was rarely there. You guessed it. We found the little temple, and the gate was open. Inside we found the lama waiting and we were certain he knew we were coming.
He spoke no English. We spoke no Tibetan. There was no translator. We made do. Drupthop Rinpoche did seem to remember Mike. He slowly gave us various consecrated substances, and he blessed ritual objects we had with us. The silences felt healing to me.
As we left the temple we looked back. He was standing on the balcony outside his room watching over us, with his hands in prayer mudra. How beautiful for Mike and us all.
As we walked back to the Swiambu stupa I kept an eye out for monkeys. They were a street gang in the buddhafield.
On my second visit to Nepal, after my interview with Chatral Rinpoche, and while I was waiting for an interview with Orgyen Tulku, I decided to revisit Swiambu. I knew it was unlikely I’d go to Nepal again, and that sacred monument was so special. I asked and I heard that Drupthop Rinpoche was in India, but I wanted to visit the stupa again.
The taxi driver let me off at the other access to the stupa, the entrance to a narrow path up the back of the mountain. It was less dramatic than heading up the 1000 steps, but it looked like a nice hike. Beside the entrance to the path was a Nepali store, with various goods, including a few excellent Buddhist items. I saw a beautifully made nine inch vajra, the thunderbolt, heavy iron and copper, two oval 8-pointed heads separated by the rounded spine you held the vajra with. It looked regal, like a royal scepter.
It looked like a symbol of power. I paid $12 for it, put it into a small black bag I was carrying, and started up the back path to Swaiambu.
About halfway up the narrow path, with an increasingly steep ridge to my left and a fairly steep incline to my right, suddenly, head on in the path, a few hundred feet away, coming directly at me, were a group of big monkeys! First I saw one; then another came right around the ridge behind it; then another came right around the ridge behind them; then another; and another, as I counted them. Seven. Big monkeys. Coming right down the narrow path I was ascending.
I didn’t hesitate long. There were only two options. The first was to turn around fast and run down the mountain, with the monkeys either laughing at me or racing after me to get me. Perhaps it was pride, but I choose the path of meditation. I opened my black bag, took the heavy metal vajra in my right hand, and started uphill with a strong walk, squeezing the vajra in my steely fist.
I continued up the path directly at the monkeys without a thought in my mind, just the New York street emotion of cutting through the intense field of it to where I was going. It took about 22 seconds for me to come face to face with the first in the row of apes, who maintained a quick pace just like me. I was furious and they clearly saw me coming uphill at a strong clip.
The moment the lead monkey and I came to the same spot I didn’t budge a fraction and went straight ahead like I owned the narrow path. The monkeys went by me to my left, without breaking pace or order. I was cool and intent. If those bastards attacked me there would have been furry bodies flying on the peaceful Buddhist mountain, I hope. I carried New York in my guts and meditation in my heart as I enjoyed my last visit to The Indescribable, squeezing the big warm thunderbolt in my right hand.
ASKING FOR DIVINATION AGAIN
Within two days of my second visit to Swaiambu I went to see about visiting the venerated dzogchen master Orgyen Tulku. The way to Orgyen Tulku was through his dynamic son and lineage heir, the unforgettable Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, who I had become connected with on my first visit to Boudhanath.
A few days after the installation of the Dudjom ku dung in February,1989, in Boudha, my friend Carol Berg came looking for me in my hotel room and said that I had to go with her, soon as possible, to meet Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, who was expecting me. She said what happened was that she was walking down the main street past the Dudjom temple when a lama stopped her and questioned her on the street, with his lama associates watching. Carol told him that she was a Dudjom student. He spoke good English and messed with her mind like a Zen master. He gave her his card. He was an eminent tulku, Ven. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche of KA-NYING temple. He said that he would be back in his sitting room in 15 minutes and she should come and see him.
She did, and again he joked with her and tested her and she got frustrated. She told him, “You have to meet my friend Robert Newman.” “Okay go get him,” Rinpoche said.
I smiled at her story and walked with her to his temple, which was near the great stupa, and very near the Khyentse temple. I was impressed to find that the temple complex was as big and stately as the Khyentse complex. Chokyi Nyima’s sitting room was on the third floor, and I was as big and impressive as Khyentse Rinpoche’s facilities.
Carol knocked at the door and I followed her in. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche was seated about 20 feet away, on a beautiful couch, leaning forward and looking at me intently, smiling from ear to ear.
“Show me your face,” he said to me strongly. “Impossible,” I said.
He said, “Be simple and point to your face.” “Not possible,” I said. He raised his voice energetically, saying, “Point to your nose!”
“What nose?” I asked him. “Ah ha,” he said. “Good one.”
Carol told him that I was Shenphen Rinpoche’s assistant and Dudjom Rinpoche’s student. He named me Shenphen Rinpoche emanation. I said I was going on retreat for a week but I’d like to see him when I returned. He said good. We told him that we had received dzogchen transmission from his father, Orgyen Tulku, the day before, with other Dudjom students. As I was leaving he insisted that he loved my nose.
After my retreat and after I visited Chatral Rinpoche again I went back to try to see Chokyi Nyima the day before I was scheduled to leave. As I walked past the KA-NYING temple door, on my way to Chokyi Nyima’s sitting room, the nine foot long trumpets and other great horns, the drums and symbols, all burst into sound. I stopped in my tracks and turned to the temple door, knowing that it was a big time ceremony, and that Chokyi Nyima probably would be presiding.
I opened the door at the moment that two monks were casting handfuls of blessing rice and flowers, and I was showered as I came in. Dripping with saffron rice and flowers I noticed Chokyi Nyina in the throne across the room from me beckoning me to come to him. I became self-conscious with everyone watching and I didn’t move. He pointed to his nose. I countered by covering my face, no face. He laughed and insisted that I come to him.
I lowered my eyes and walked across to his throne. He offered me an apple from his plate. I said, “I need to see you. I’m leaving soon. Can I see you at noon tomorrow?” He said, “At 10am”. I leaned toward him and whispered, “I’m going to make you very happy.” Rinpoche giggled.
The next day I arrived at 10am and had to wait until noon for him to see me.
While I waited a magical thing happened. Down the hall came Orgyen Tulku, supported by two attendants. I had the silk scarf I was going to offer to Chokyi Nyima. I offered it to Orgyen Tulku. He accepted it, put it back around my neck. He brought my head to his head touching his forehead to mine and white light poured into me from him. Then he left.
When I entered Chokyi Nyima’s drawing room, trying to ask for a transmission, he took me by the arm and said, “Quick. There’s no time to waste. This is my most special means of blessing. It’s a terma vajra from Guru Rinpoche himself, with powerful energy.”
He put it on my lowered head and said mantra or prayer as energy poured into me. Then he stopped and said, “Enough?” “No,” I said. “I need more.” He put the terma vajra on my throat, and then on my heart, pouring mantra into me with blessing energy.
He smiled and said, “Have you had enough yet?” “No!!” I exclaimed. “I need some more!” He put the vajra on my back and fired energy into me, and then he went around to my front and did a blessing on my genitals. He giggled and said, “Now your thing isn’t going to work any more”. I said, “That’s not true. It’s going to work better.” Then I declared, “DZA, HUNG!” and Rinpoche followed with,”BAM, HO!” It’s a Nyingma protector command. Two monks in the room got excited.
Chokyi Nyima and I stayed in communication. He sent me a beautiful letter at the time of Nancy’s death. Then I wrote and told him that I was returning to Nepal and that I hoped to get a divination from Orgyen Tulku regarding Medigrace.
I found him in his drawing room and available on my first attempt. He was grinning at me but I kept a cool demeanor. I approached him with my offering scarf, and before offering it I turned my head around and quickly strapped on a big pointed nose, bright red. I placed the offering scarf from my left hand, over the nose, and over my right hand. I turned and bowed forward offering the scarf to a laughing Chokyi Nyima. He asked if the nose was for him and I gladly gave it to him.
He put the nose on and showed his attendants. He took it off. I said that I hoped to see Orgyen Tulku for a divination. I asked about his father’s health. He said that he was frail but still powerful. He arranged for me to see his father the next day.
Orgyen Tulku most of the time lived 12 miles outside Bodhanath at a small temple called Nagi Gompa, in the foothills above the Kathmandu valley. Pollution in the Kathmandu valley had intensified in the two years since I’d been there, and close as we were to the great Himalayas they were barely visible. And the there were serious problems with the water.
I had brought the two drollo phurbas for Rinpoche to bless for me, as I had done with Chatral Rinpoche two days before. He charged them with his phurba. The translator was a German doctor, Rinpoche’s personal physician, who spoke English well. I told him about Medigrace, the attempt to create news kinds of medicine, mind/body medicine. I said I was very concerned that I was an egoist and just making a big deal out of myself with something that might not be realistic. I said nothing about what Chatral Rinpoche said.
The doctor spoke to Orgyen Tulku at length, and then Rinpoche took his gold amber mala from around his neck and began a long divination. We were sitting in his small bedroom and the room was flooded with sunlight. Finally Rinpoche spoke to the doctor.
“In the first place, your motivation is good,” said the doctor. “Secondly your medicine is good and can help many people. It could even help Tibetan lamas.” Orgyen Tulku said something more. The doctor said, “He said it could even help him. He didn’t think he was going to America again, but if it was for his health he might go.”
I was taken by what he said and am still trying to understand it. But as for encouragement for Medigrace, I got a double blast In Nepal. And I was able to be alone with the ku dung of Khyentse Rinpoche.
He had died two months before and his ku dung was being preserved in an upright coffin in his sitting room in the Khyentse temple, the room where I had received the Garuda empowerment.
I spent hours sitting with his relic body, which was scheduled to be cremated in Bhutan. It was a grace to be there at that moment, to be in his great silence, to be in primordial wisdom with him, to express my profound gratitude.
As I sat there I vividly recalled the Garuda empowerment and the two times His Holiness had consecrated statues for me in that room. The second one was the Medicine Buddha. I held the statue with both hands in his lap as he held it too. We waited that way while a monk went to get the scripture for transferring the deity to the statue. Our hands were touching.
As we waited Rinpoche looked intently at the beautifully-made statue. He became the Medicine Buddha and I saw his body go into the statue when he transferred the deity into it. The statue was no longer a work of art. It was and is the Medicine Buddha. In his drawing room with his ku dung, alone, I cherished his precious gifts and aspired to make use of them.
As I left Nepal I felt sure I’d never return. I went back to the USA more healed and determined to make a contribution to medicine.
MEDIGRACE PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT
At the time that Medigrace was incorporated and registered with the IRS, in December, 1991, I had a private office in a real estate firm at 51 East 42nd Street. My office served as the Medigrace office until I left New York for Ashland, Oregon in 1995.
I lived mostly downtown, and sometimes life took me through the streets near the Dudjom center and Nancy’s tragedy. Shenphen Rinpoche and the Dudjom family had been staying in Europe and the Orient for years. As I experienced before in my life, it’s often a new New York, and the work on Medigrace was exciting.
I began to study the research in the medical uses of meditation and energy medicine. It took meetings with medical scientists and extensive work for several years to develop our program for medical and childbirth applications of meditation. The research and clinical programs at the Harvard Medical School and the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in the medical applications of meditation were and are the programs we’ve built on.
Peter Monk died of brain cancer in San Francisco in 1992, going blind on the way out. We got close again and had long phone conversations. The day before he died we were hanging out. He was in his death bed in a hospital. I was talking to him about the dharmakaya, space as the ultimate nature of awareness, since he was interested in Buddhism. But that didn’t work. We spontaneously tested his brain function by reciting T.S. Eliot lines we had both been fond of in our youth. I started off:
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
but neither arrest nor movement....”
Peter continued: “The release from action and suffering,
release from the inner and outer compulsion,
yet surrounded by a sense of grace, a white light still and moving,
erhebung without motion, concentration without elimination,
both a new world and the old made explicit,
understood in the completion of its partial ecstasy,
the resolution of its partial horror.”
A nurse interrupted. Peter had to go. Goodbye Peter. He left a loving wife and two fine children. By great fortune my life was just getting going.
INFINITE WORLD GIVES AND TAKES AWAY
On the West Coast various Dudjom students had been helping develop Dudjom centers since 1981. Niyune Ding, born in Taiwan, was the gem of the West Coast Dudjom students that I knew. We were good friends. She decided that she wanted to fix me up with her good friend Chiau Pei, a concert pianist and a very beautiful Chinese woman. I met Chiau Pei on the phone and we became easy friends. Shenphen Rinpoche was making a rare teaching trip from somewhere to San Francisco, and Chiau Pei arranged for me to stay with her in her fine house in the Oakland Hills from which we could attend Shenphen Rinpoche’s teachings.
She picked me up at the San Francisco airport and I was charmed. She was knock out beautiful light skinned Chinese, and she had an 8 year old daughter so smart she rocked me.
We went for a good Chinese dinner and then to Chiau Pei’s beautiful house in the Oakland Hills. That was a romantic evening par excellence. She had a great guest room for me.
The next day her wannabe boyfriend, a psychology teacher at Cal Berkeley, got wind of me and tried to take over. He joined us for the day’s teachings with Shenphen Rinpoche, and then he bought nice dinner things to prepare back at Chiau Pei’s house. He was intentionally taking up all the space he could between Chiau Pei and me even though she was an angel sent to me to heal my relation to Nancy. I had to go out to meet another friend for a drink. Chiau Pei said she’d be there when I got back.
I had two cognacs with my friend at the huge Fremont hotel in Berkeley, and then called Chiau Pei to say I was on my way back. No answer. I had another drink and called again. No answer. And so on. I didn’t know that her guy friend in panic had pressured Chiau Pei out of her house and into his house for the night. She left her door unlocked for me, with a note on the door, but I didn’t know.
I stayed in a funky motel in Oakland and slept badly, then took a taxi to Chiau Pei’s house in the morning. She looked stunningly beautiful and embarrassed that she let herself be pulled away the night before. She’d thought I’d come in and use the house, and she felt bad that I’d stayed in the motel. She had no time to talk. She had to devote the next hour to rehearsing for a concert in San Francisco the following week. I asked if I could listen before I left for the airport.
She was happy to play for me. Her Steinway piano was the only thing in her living room. She sat down and played Chopin more excitingly than I’d ever heard his music. She was wonderful and I could have loved her.
I didn’t speak to her for months, and then I heard that she was suddenly dying of lung cancer, having never smoked cigarettes. A month later I called Niyune Ding who had been visiting Chiau Pei on her death bed. Niyune said Chiau Pei looked like a concentration camp victim and could no longer speak. I asked her to tell Chiau Pei that I loved her. She did. I felt it go into Chiau Pei.
She died and was cremated within a year of my meeting her. A year later there was a huge fire in the Oakland hills and her house was burned to the ground. Praised. Be. The lord.
GOLF BALL REVELATION
When I was growing up as a little boy, down the block from me lived a little boy named Alan, who was friends with my friend Peter the poet. Many years later I visited Alan in upstate New York where he lived with his long-time wife Laura. Alan was retired by then, and he played golf.
One July night it was so hot Alan couldn’t sleep, and at first light he put his bag of golf clubs in his car and headed to the golf course, so that he could play a few holes before the sun came up. As he went to the tee for the first hole he was surprised to see a Chinese guy also walking to the first hole in semi-darkness. Alan greeted him and asked if he could join him. Alan was answered by a few gruff words of Chinese. He decided that meant OK though he knew the guy was angry.
Al said, “You go first.” The guy refused to look at Alan, muttered more curses in Chinese, and then Alan noted that the guy only had one golf club, an iron. The guy set the ball on the tee, set himself, and then drove the ball far up the fairway with his iron. Alan was impressed. The guy stepped back and Alan hit a weak shot into the fairway as the Chinese guy cursed again and headed after his ball.
Alan dogged the Chinese guy through 9 holes, until the guy started to leave. The sun was up and blazing. Alan confronted him and sincerely asked the guy to teach him to play golf. The guy looked at Alan for the first time and made a loud “HA,” then cursed in Chinese. Alan insisted. The guy, as if to get rid of Alan, said OK be here tomorrow same time. Alan was aware that the guy might just be trying to get rid of him.
But the next morning soon after first light when Alan arrived at the golf course the Chinese whiz also arrived. Alan was smart and shut up, until they got to the tee for the first hole. Alan spoke and asked the Whiz to teach him to swing better. “HA!, said the Whiz. “You don’t know how to sit still and you expect to know how to move!!”
He turned away from Alan, turned toward the East, calmed himself and sat down into meditation posture, his eyes half open, focusing to calm all the way down. Alan assumed a similar posture and started to slow down. And then the guy just didn’t move. It got so still you could see the light increasing in the sky. Though Alan was a bit edgy the Whiz sat like a statue of the Buddha and Alan sat with him. The Whiz didn’t move until the sun broke through the horizon, coming up into the sky.
The Whiz arose and started to leave. “Hey!” said Alan. “Is that it? You show me stillness and then you do not show me how to swing?” The Whiz stopped. OK come early again tomorrow he said.
The next morning Alan came a little earlier, when it was still mostly dark, so he’d be sitting meditating when the Whiz arrived, but then Alan almost walked into him in the darkish air. He had been meditating there just as first light really broke. They silently sat together for a while. Then they arose. “OK,” said the Whiz. “Show me swing.”
Alan took his best driving club, teed up, composed himself, brought his breathing down, and hit a weak shot off to the right. He slowly turned and faced the Whiz. “HA!!” shouted the Whiz, and he suddenly threw the golf ball he was holding in his right hand straight at Alan’s face!!!
Alan became altered. As if he had all the time he needed in a split second he reached up and caught the ball in front of his forehead. The shock of the ball in his hand vibrated in his head . And just like that the Whiz left, drove away, and Alan never saw him again.
When Alan told me the story he said that was his first experience of paranormal ability. He said it was like revelation to focus so intensely on a ball in so little time and to move far quicker than he thought he was able to move. But unfortunately Alan did little and then no meditation after that. Sadly he didn’t use the key in the ball the Whiz gave him. Instead he became a very heavy smoker, but his golf game did improve.
A FAMOUS YOGI OF POWERS
In all my years among the Tibetan lamas I know of no one as respected for his paranormal powers as Yeshe Dorje Rinpoche. He was a traditionally trained tulku who chose early in his life to live in retreat and fully concentrate on the practices. At the age of 22 he met Dudjom Rinpoche, his root lama. For several years he received all the Dudjom Tersar empowerments and extensive teachings and transmissions. He then did what Padmasambhava had done before him. He looked for a dangerous and feared place to do a three year, three month, three day retreat in Dudjom Tersar practices.
There was an outstandingly special place like that called Hill of Demons, a small mountain, not too far from Dudjom Rinpoche’s main temple. It was well known that several meditators had died trying to do retreat there. It was believed to be inhabited by “demonic spirits”.
Yeshe Dorje completed the Hill of Demons retreat successfully and then returned to Dudjom Rinpoche for continuity.
He was 30 years old by then. He almost immediately began to demonstrate a remarkable control over the weather, and from then onwards, through several more dangerous three year retreats, he became the weather-man for the Dalai Lama and provided weather protection for many important ceremonies. We’re talking about a three day ceremony in which the sky is clear and sunny around the temple and raining everywhere else in the region, day after day, witnessed by up to 10,000 people. He did that many times. He also was famous for creating rain for sustained periods in drought conditions. He had practiced devotedly and developed inherent paranormal abilities, more than just the ability to control weather.
I think that this age of thermonuclear and bio-weapon threats we live in is a Hill of Demons. No need to go to Tibet. In an age where we feel powerless to do something about the threats to our lives, Yeshe Dorje was a precious example of someone who really made use of his life, took Buddhist methods all the way into the human potential, and used seemingly miraculous powers for the benefit of life.
I met Yeshe Dorje for the first time in 1989, just outside the Dudjom temple in Bodhanath, at a break in the ceremony. He was one of a number of famous tulkus who were part of the Dudjom Tersar family in close quarters with the Western students. He was leaning against a car and jiving with several of the American ladies. He was joyful. On the top of his head he wore a large silver vajra tied up in his long gray hair. He was dressed beautifully in white robes with red and gold under garments. He spoke little English and clearly was enjoying the ladies. Since I was close with those ladies I approached. He called me to him, took me by the arm, and held me. He said, “This good man. This good man for you women to have.” We all laughed heartily. (I had zero sexual life at that time.)
That night I went out looking for him. I had heard he was leading a Troma Wangmo (Black Dakini) practice. I found him in a room full of people who were singing the practice with him beautifully, using their drums and bells. He looked magnificent, powerful, realized leading the practice.
The next night I went looking for him. I found him circumambulating the great stupa, walking slowly, with his assistant Chris, who I knew well from a retreat she had done at the Dudjom retreat center in New York State. I asked Chris to tell Yeshe Dorje that I wanted to make personal connection with him. She spoke to him and I heard the words Dudjom Rinpoche and Shenphen Rinpoche used. Yeshe Dorje reached out to me warmly, took my left hand in his right hand, and walked with me silently around the great stupa three times, holding hands all the way. That was timeless. I bonded with him.
After that I didn’t see him again until 1991, after my second visit to Nepal, when I heard he was giving the Dudjom Vajrakilaya and two other empowerments at my friend John Pott’s house outside Boston. I went, and reconnected with him for three days in the context of retaking key empowerments I’d received from Dudjom Rinpoche. I gave him a drollod phurba blessed by Chatral Rinpoche.
Then in 1992 I heard he was giving a weekend of teachings and empowerments at OCD. I went. We had a good translator and it was a joy to be around him for a couple of days. At the end of the first day he came up to me and spoke to me in a little English. He said he understood I had learned how to do the practices from Shenphen Rinpoche, and that Shenphen Rinpoche was the one who knew how to do the Dudjom Tersar practices right. He asked if I had a recording of Shenphen Rinpoche presenting the practices, demonstrating the right sound. I said yes. He said he’d like a copy. I said I’d make him one that night.
The next morning, at the start of the teachings, the translator said to me, “Robert, Rinpoche wants you to teach vase breathing.” Previously Shenphen Rinpoche had asked me to demonstrate the mudras before his vase breathing classes, and he had spent a remarkable amount of time repeating and going over the practice with me and others. It was easy to teach it to Yeshe Dorje’s class. I knew most of the people, and it went well. I went slowly and carefully. After I finished I looked at Rinpoche and he gave me an enthusiastic double thumbs up.
Several days later in New York City, in John Giorno’s shrine room, Yeshe Dorje was about to give a teaching and again, at the very beginning, he asked me to teach vase breathing and the mudras to start the class. The teaching went even better than the first time. I went slowly and thoroughly. This was important in my development as a teacher of vase breathing for medical and childbirth uses. In Yeshe Dorje’s energy field I fully articulated the practice and it felt right. Many of the students thanked me, at OCD and in New York. The magic yogi was good for me.
Months later I was in Los Angeles, his home base for a few years, and I called and went to see him. Chris was there to welcome me and provide good communication service. She led me into Rinpoche’s bedroom where he was sitting on the side of his bed, in beautiful robes, watching television. He accepted my offering scarf and gestured for me to sit beside him. He held my hand and we watched TV in silence for more than an hour.
Timeless awareness.
Chris brought tea. Then I asked Rinpoche a question through Chris. Rinpoche answered. I knew his health was declining and I didn’t want to tax his energy by asking him to speak any more. I bowed to him and put my forehead against the back of his left hand in his lap. He put his right hand on my head to bless me. I lingered a little in the precious charge of his blessing, and then I stood up to leave. He asked Chris to give me some Dharma images, and I left with them in my hand, images of wrathful protectors he no doubt had mastered, whatever forces of nature they be.
Rinpoche had significant health problems even before he left Tibet, and then in 1993 he was diagnosed with advanced inoperable cancer. I heard nothing more for some time. I was concerned about him and I called his Los Angeles apartment to speak to Chris or Rinpoche’s wife Grace to see how he was.
Someone picked up the phone. I clearly heard several people not far from the phone singing the Troma practice, with drums and bells. In an instant I knew that Rinpoche had picked up the phone on his death bed, with close students doing the practice that he had mastered.
That was one of the most stunning moments of my life. I heard him breathe, with the phone to his ear, as the haunting melody of the Dudjom Troma practice went on.
For a minute or so I just listened with Rinpoche, hearing his heavy breath and the chanting. Then I said, “Rinpoche?” His silence and the chanting continued. Then he said, “Aaaggg” in a screechy voice, overcome by cancer.
The chanting went on and I stayed with him, in his space. In another timeless minute or so I said, “Rinpoche, I love you.” After a few seconds he said, “Aaagggghhh.” Again we took to silence and heard the Troma melodies and the drums and bells. After I while I hung up. I was in my business office.
I heard that he died soon after that and his body was sent to New Mexico, to a disciple’s property, for ceremonial cremation. My close friend Jonathan Altman, so important in helping John Giorno bring Dudjom Rinpoche to America, attended Yeshe Dorje’s cremation. Yeshe means primordial wisdom, all knowing, and dorje means skillful means and diamond, indestructible.
Johnathan told me that it was a very simple and humble ceremony compared to the elaborate Trungpa Rinpoche cremation, but he said the situation had the energy of the death of a Buddhist master.
Jonathan parked his car and walked out to the cremation site, prepared by Nyingma lamas. Spiraling dust clouds were close to him all the way. He said extraordinary cloud, light, and wind phenomena occurred all day, and it was an unforgettable event. I’ve met others who said the same. Death is a great spiritual teacher, especially when enlightened masters die.
That wonderful being was key in setting me going into a path of teaching vase breathing. Shenphen Rinpoche had established me in that path and and Yeshe Dorje Rinpoche was a second blessing upon that.
MEDIGRACE AND THE VASE OF LIFE
I became friends with Eleanor Olsen in 1970. She was the curator of the excellent Tibetan art collection at the Newark Art Museum, the finest Tibetan collection in the New York metropolitan area at that time. She set up and maintained a Tibetan Buddhist shrine there. She brought flowers, changed the water bowl offerings, burned incense, and made a prayer every day for years as she developed the collection. She was a sincere early student of Tibetan Buddhist art.
She generously gave several of her own thanka scroll paintings to me to offer Trungpa Rinpoche for his shrine rooms. She gave me, as a personal gift, a beautiful old thanka painting from Tibet. It represents Amitayus, the Buddha of Infinite Life. The central image is of a buddha in human form seated in meditation posture, hands in lap, with the Life Vase in his/her hands, tse bum, the Vase of Immortality The vase is held at the level of his/her navel. The lamas called it a “long life” thanka, an image of unlimited life. Your can see that the Vase is inside the body, in the energy body.
In all my years with Trungpa Rinpoche the beautiful old thanka had not been central to my practice in any way. I didn’t know of any practice associated with it. But when I returned to New York in 1980, that thanka came alive for me as if by magic in more ways than one.
First, I was living with the thanka in Dudjom Rinopoche’s house, like I had carried it back into Tibet. To me the Dudjom house was wish-fulfilling magicland, and my thanka represented a yoga that the Nyingma masters founded their practices in. Vase breathing was essential to the Nyingma masters. Also, the Dudjom center didn’t have enough Tibetan art, and from the time that Shenphen Rinpoche first saw my thanka it was seen as Dudjom Rinpoche’s long life thanka. We asked His Holiness to consecrate it, to write the seed syllables and mantra on the back, and to transfer the Buddha of Infinite Life into the painting, in support of his own life. He did that, and the thanka hung over his bed in the New York house until his death, when it was returned to me.
The mindful/awareness meditation practice I maintained for 10 years with Trungpa Rinpoche was essentially the same practice used in the Harvard Medical School and University of Massachusetts Medical Center programs, the mind/body is the model. You follow your breath and you practice the profound intentional shift from mind to awareness. You gain important mind/body benefits, including pain management and immune system enhancement.
In 1980 I began to receive empowerments and teachings based on deep knowledge of the energy body and how it breathes. I began to practice breathing energy into my energy body, and in doing so my meditation practice began to center in the energetic life vase in my navel center. I was trained in even more extensive mindful/awareness practice, and it was all on the basis of breathing vital energy into the energy body.
Regarding applications in medicine or childbirth, as I saw it, if mindful/ awareness meditation is good for healing and for childbirth, for pain management and immune enhancement, vase breathing meditation has to be even better. It has exactly the same important mind/body effect, but it is based on a more empowering vision of the body and its function. An integrated mind/body and energy body model was inherent in vase breathing meditation.
Starting in 1980 my training in small and large vase breathing, bum chung and bum chen, was extensive. I was particularly well trained in small vase breathing by a doctor lama, Shenphen Dawa Rinpoche, who saw vase breathing as a healing practice.
RED TARA AND THE BLESSING OF THE VASE OF LIFE
One of Dudjom Lingpa’s six tulku sons was Apong Terton, revealer of Red Tara treasures destined to be a blessing in the West. In Apong Terton’s revelation, Red Tara’s right hand is extended offering the life vase. She is anyone who does the practice after receiving Red Tara empowerment. Without ego you practice being Red Tara. You practice an empowered energy body. When you do the Red Tara practice you extend the life vase, blessing the life force of whoever you reach out to, offering the practice of vase breathing. That’s how you give people their vase.
In my life time the respected Nyingma tulku and doctor Chagdud Tulku has been the main transmitter of the Apong Terton Red Tara revelations throughout the West. He is a Dudjom Tersar lama. He published renditions of the practices in English that were user-friendly and magnificent, and he transmitted melodic mantra and prayers for the practices. Many people have become attracted to the Red Tara practice through him, people who relate to no other Buddhist practices.
I myself as a guy who grew up in the hip sexual world of New York have never had the slightest problem with being Red Tara. In fact I love having the gorgeous red woman body, the rainbow silk lingerie, the wish-fulfilling jewelry, the indigo hair, and the golden crown, as I offer the life vase in my right hand. I had to wait to get the empowerment from Chagdud Tulku in 1994, in Oregon. By then I had been teaching vase breathing for many years.
It was a joy to teach vase breathing and energy body function in the context of traditional Buddhist yoga, and it was as great a joy to teach it to doctors and patients, and it would be the greatest joy of all to teach vase breathing for childbirth, after I moved to the West Coast.
NEW MEDICINE
In 1994 after more than ten years of using credit to keep my work with the lamas going, a downturn of my income had me stressed financially, along with other stresses I felt in the big hard city and the big hard age. I was bankrupt. I needed to take a leap. Doctor Gerald Lehrburger had invited me to move the Medigrace headquarters to Ashland, Oregon. Chagdud Tulku had two centers in Oregon, and the Dudjom West Coast center was in Ashland, with Gyatrul Rinpoche, who I felt close to. I had been to Ashland in 1983 and 1991 to visit him.
After a year of directing Chagdud Tulku’s Dudjom Tersar center in the shrine room in my apartment on East 23rd Street in New York, 10 blocks from the Dudjom center which was inactive at that time, Chagdud Tulku came to New York in October, gave interviews in my shrine room, and afterwards I sat there with him and his excellent American wife Jane.
Rinpoche was noble and handsome, like a great Navaho medicine man, with a white grey beard and long white grey hair tied up in a bun. He also looked like a classical Oriental wiseman.
Jane was ready to celebrate the establishing of their center in New York.
I cleared my throat and said, “Rinpoche, I have to leave New York.” Jane jumped a little. I was looking Rinpoche right in the eyes and he didn’t move. Good buddha. He said nothing. Jane said that the young plant of this center might fail. I said I had to focus my life on medicine. It was decided that I could go out and visit Rinpoche’s center in Cottage Grove, Oregon, and look around. I said that I’d go for Thanksgiving weekend. I figured I’d be going there at a quiet time for the center.
What I didn’t know until I arrived at the Cottage Grove center was that Thanksgiving weekend was the one time each year Chagdud Tulku came to that center, his original center in America, and every year he gave the Red Tara empowerment then, for two days, with long passages of the haunting melodies.
I also didn’t know until I arrived in Cottage Grove that Chagdud Tulku’s grandson, Orgyen, 6 years old, had been enthroned twice in Tibet as an important reincarnation and he was coming to the empowerment that weekend too.
A MOST MAGICAL THANKSGIVING
I bought a plane ticket to San Francisco, rented a car, and drove up to Ashland, Oregon, to meet Gerry Lehrburger, MD, and discuss moving Medigrace there. Other doctors in Ashland were interested. At all times Ashland had a special attraction for me because the West Coast Dudjom center was there.
I had a perfect two days with doctor Gerry and his wife nurse Bev in which they concluded that they wanted me to relocate Medigrace to Ashland. I had been to the Dudjom center south of Ashland several times over the years. I was close to Gyatrul Rinpoche and Sangye Khandro. I did not visit the big Dudjom Tersar temple complex this time. I was headed up to Cottage Grove, about 3 hours north of Ashland, just south of Eugene and the University of Oregon, an area I wanted to explore.
Chagdud Tulku’s center in Cottage Grove is called River House or Dechen Ling, and is beautifully situated on the Willamette River. It has a Dudjom Tersar shrine room, with photographs of Dudjom Rinpoche and other great lamas, and it has a large ceramic statue of Red Tara made by Chagdud Tulku. Five or six Tibetan people lived in the house at that time, including Jigme Lama and his wife Pema who imported Tibetan art for Buddhist practitioners. Lama Sonam Tsering was the attending lama, pure Dudjom Tersar, very devoted to Thinley Norbu Rinpoche. Lama Sonam and I were to become close in the years to come.
As I arrived at River House I was aware that I was going to be staying in the center exactly at the time when, on the other side of the Earth, in Nepal, a Dudjom tulku was being enthroned with great ceremony by Chatral Rinpoche at his temple in Parping. Several Dudjom reincarnations were anticipated. I thought: how good to be sitting in a Dudjom Tersar shrine room at the time a reincarnation of Dudjom Rinpoche was being enthroned on the other side of the world.
Within minutes of coming through the door I heard double exciting news. Chagdud Tulku was arriving the next day to offer the annual Red Tara empowerment and he was bringing with him his grandson, Orgyen, who had quietly been enthroned as a tulku in three Nyingma monasteries in Tibet last summer! Total magic, and great relief from my underlying stress over bankruptcy and relocation. I felt really blessed.
The next day in came Chagdud Tulku, his wife JaneTromge, his son Jigme Tromge Rinpoche, and a bright shining six year old tulku boy. And so it seemed that two different Dudjom tulkus had been recognized in Nepal, and possibly a third, Orgyen Tromge, had been quietly enthroned the past summer in large Nyingma monasteries still surviving in Tibet.
Everyone disappeared for the night and reappeared for the Tara empowerment in the morning. There were three thrones, large, midsize, and smaller. It was great to see Chagdud Tulku preside over his original shrine room in America for the Red Tara empowerment I’d waited for,
and it was extra vivid because of the tulku in the small throne. I thought he well might be a reincarnation of my root lama, and what a great way to meet. Several reincarnations of my root lama?
As the empowerment proceeded I knew that everyone was aware of the enthronement ceremony in Nepal. I took a seat right in front of the young tulku. He followed the pages of the scripture somewhat. He seemed to have grace. He rang his bell correctly at the right times and sang some of the mantra. He cast red rice like a pro in the blessing prayers. His mother was a young American woman who had married Jigme Tromge Rinpoche to help him get an American passport. Her name was Rigdzin. I really liked her.
During the intermission I made friends with Orgyen. He only spoke English. We made some drawings together. I asked him if he knew who Dudjom Rinpoche was. He said yes. I said that I attended him and his family for years. He let me take three photographs of him. At the end of the day I said to Chagdud Tulku that I felt that his grandson was a Dudjom tulku. He said that he had visions that confirmed that, and there had been enthronement ceremonies in Tibet.
The lights were turned off after dinner and Jigme Tromge Rinpoche gave us a most remarkable slide show, from Tibet the summer before, increasing the entertainment level off the charts for me.
First we see a misty Tibetan plain with a ceremonial procession carrying a jeweled carriage, with great trumpets and drums. Jigme Tromge said, “I thought they were coming for me. I was shocked to find out that they were coming to take Orgyen in procession to their monastery to enthrone him.” Good sense of humor.
Then we see sweet photos of Orgyen in the open carriage, smiling ear to ear, radiantly happy. It was a large surviving Nyingma monastery and temple complex, rebuilt after damage from the Chinese invasion. There were good photos of Orgyen in the big throne during the ceremony, a beautifully robed cool young buddha.
Then there were photos of processions and enthronement ceremonies at two other Nyingma monasteries. Few Westerners knew of his 3 enthronements in Tibet.
There was one other remarkable series of images. Jigme Tromge and Orgyen, with two guides, climbed up a chilling rope ladder, up the equivalent of 90 stories of the Empire State Building, to get to a secret sacred cave up over the top of the cliff, and then they climbed down a rope ladder 55 feet into the earth into the special cave, a Padmasambhava cave. On the way up the cliff Jigme Tromge panicked several times. He told us, “I thought, if my students could see how frightened I am now they’d all leave me.” Laughs.
I had some questions which he welcomed. “How really did you know that there was a payoff up over the titanic cliff and then down 55 feet into the earth, on old ropes that could go any minute? Who convinced you to go and what did they know?” “Good questions,” he said. “I have to think about that.”
During the second day of the Red Tara empowerment I was sitting with my eyes closed, thinking, “If he awakens you it’s your root lama.”
Suddenly (I tell you the truth) I got hit with what I thought was an electrical jolt strong enough to knock me off my meditation cushion.
Outrageous little Orgyen had just taken a handful of the red blessing rice and thrown it right into my face, waking me up. Afterwards two women came up to me and said, “Hey, you’re the guy the tulku threw the rice at during the ceremony. It hit us too and it felt like an electric shock.”
FIVE REINCARNATIONS?
I’m writing this note in 2014. Shenphen Rinpoche once told me that after Dudjom Lingpa passed (1904) there were then 5 recognized reincarnations, which were called the body, speech, mind, special qualities, and enlightened activities aspects of the incarnating tulku, but only one of them, the mind aspect, was the most essential incarnation, the Yangsi. Dudjom Rinpoche was the mind aspect, the Yangsi of Dudjom Lingpa. In the case of the Dudjom Rinpoche reincarnations, from the earliest recognitions I heard various Dudjom Tersar lamas call the Dudjom tulku
with Chatral Rinpoche in Nepal “Dudjom Yangsi”. I know that a few years later there were said to be three Dudjom tulkus with Chatral Rinpoche, one called Dudjom Yangsi, who was Thinley Norbu’s nephew, and one of the other two was Orgyen Tromge. Years later I heard that when Orgyen Tromge Rinpoche was 17 years old he left Chatral Rinpoche’s care, left the tulku training, to go out on his own, wanting a Western education. Last I heard of him he was 21 and just graduating from college, very smart and interested in several things. Meanwhile Dudjom Yangsi has emerged as a major living Buddha. Thinley Norbu requested in his will that Dudjom Yangsi preside over his cremation, which then took place in Bhutan in 2012. Soon after there were many videos online focused on Dudjom Yangsi at the cremation, wearing the 5 buddha crown, sitting with immovable force, hour after hour, more than human. That’s what many people saw. That’s what I saw. He lives in Tibet, but several Western Dudjom lamas have offered their centers to Dudjom Yangsi, and other Dudjom Tersar lamas have requested that he visit and bless their centers. It is said that he will probably come, in time, hopefully including a visit to Tashi Choling outside of Ashland as well as the main Dudjom centers in New York.
MEDIGRACE MOVES TO ASHLAND
I took the events of the 1994 Red Tara Thanksgiving as a sign to definitely move to Oregon. I had Tibet there too, and doctors in Ashland wanted Medigrace. Chagdud Tulku’s main center was in Northern California, in Junction City, west of Redding, and Orgyen Tromge was living there with his parents. That wasn’t too far from Ashland, 4 hours by car. I told Chagdud Tulku that now was the time for me to make a strong effort to succeed in the medical field with the meditation/medicine program I’d developed. He promised to keep me and my work in his prayers.
Ashland is considered by many to be a gem of the West Coast. The physical location is spectacular. It’s just over the Siskiyou Pass, the highest pass on the West Coast, 10 miles north of California. Mount Shasta looks so close when you’re up on Mount Ashland it’s stunning. Power places. I arrived edgy from a life in New York on January 15th, 1995, needing grace and luck.
Tashi Choling, the Dudjom temple, is located in the Colestein Valley, between Ashland and California, facing Mount Shasta, right on the California border. It will do for Tibet in America, and over the years Gyatrul Rinpoche has directed the building of a temple complex of the finest quality of Nyingma temples.
The town of Ashland is home for about 20,000 people. It has Southern Oregon University and the best theater outside of New York City. What? Check it out. Seven theaters. For a town of 20,000 it’s loaded with culture and physical beauty. It also has forward-thinking medical practitioners, and Jean Houston and Gary Zukov.
Gerry Lehrburger was happy to find that on my own I made friends with several doctors and nurses in Ashland. Within 18 months I accomplished several things: I established a business in caregiving (home care), to earn a living and help others do caregiving work; I was seated on the Southern Oregon Home Health Council; I was offered a clinical practice in meditation as medicine in the offices of James Dunn, MD, Chairman of the Board of Ashland Community Hospital; and I finalized the meditation/medicine program for Oregon hospitals by recording an audioguide for medical professionals and patients.
MEDIGRACE COMES ALIVE
The meditation audiocassette I had developed for medical use was similar to the one with Jon Kabat Zinn’s voice used in the UMMC program. Their audioguide had a 45 minute reclining practice of progressive relaxation, based on Edwin Jacobson’s renowned work with neuromuscular release, and a 30 minute sitting meditation. Both practices used mindful/awareness meditation.
Our audioguide was called Calm Healing. On one side was a 45 minute reclining meditation practice, Practice of Deep Release, progressive neuromuscular release, and a 30 minute sitting meditation practice, Breathing Healing Energy (vase breathing) on the other side. The difference between the Medigrace and UMMC practices was and is in the awareness of body and breathing, as described in my books.
I was also learning how to work with the four hospitals in my region.
ASANTE Health Care owned three of the hospitals. I met with someone in the clinical education department. She had attended a program at UMMC and was interested in my background. She also said that ASANTE had the perception that its health care providers were significantly stressed and in general had poorer health than average. And there were drug and alcohol problems. She arranged for ASANTE to promote my 6 hour medical uses of meditation program for its doctors and nurses, and arranged for us to have free use of the conference rooms in the Smullin Medical Education Center of the Rogue Valley Medical Center (RVMC). In the years to come I did many trainings there.
The six hour one day seminar, 9am-noon and 1-4pm, was the time format that worked from the beginning and still works for the introductory childbirth program. By the middle of 1998 I had presented
Medical Uses of Meditation programs 18 times in 6 hospitals, assisted mostly by JoAnn Walker, RN, a major person in the history of Medigrace.
We had a very successful six hour training seminar at the Williamette Valley Cancer Center in Eugene, which received front-page coverage in the Eugene newspaper: “Meditation Enters Mainstream.”
We also did many programs at Ashland Community Hospital, where we had strong support from several doctors and nurses.
MEETING THE PRIMAL NURSE
One of the doctors who supported the Medigrace work and was on our Board of Directors, Gerry Lehrburger, introduced me to a nurse he deeply respected, Sandra Bardsley. For years she had been recovering from a terrible car accident. She had been comatose for a prolonged period of time, and then her healing from the many injuries and the trauma was very long. Her healing became her spiritual journey. She came to Oregon, to Grants Pass. Then it became clear to her that Ashland, an hour south of Grants Pass is where she had to move to, to complete healing.
I invited her to dinner. She still used a wheelchair a lot. She was a devout
Mormon. She had served as a midwife in Mormon missions in 3rd world countries, as well as having worked as a nurse in American hospitals.
She had never met a Buddhist before, but she was wide open. I talked to her a little about the Tibetan masters I had studied with. Then I welcomed her into my meditation room. It was my treasury of sacred art and ritual objects. I said I couldn’t begin to explain it. I touched her with blessed ritual objects and gave her spiritual medicines from Nyingma masters. Giving freely to her open and devoted nature, I said mantra appropriate for each specific offering. We took our time with various treasures that will be in the Tashi Choling shrine room someday.
Afterwards I thanked her for her openness. We didn’t talk much. I helped her back into her car.
The next day I was on Main Street in Ashland just about to enter Sound Peace Bookstore, when out of the corner of my left eye I noticed a woman walking down the street radiating. I stopped and turned. You rarely see that, a radiant human, though I had seen it with Dudjom Rinpoche. I marveled at this radiant person for a second or 2 and then realized it was Sandra! I backed away from the bookstore looking toward her, amazed. She was smiling broadly and looking right at me, about 100 feet away. When we met I said, “Sandra, you’re so well!” “Did you have any doubt?” she replied. I said, “I had no idea. I just shared with you what I had.”
Several years later, at a teacher training I was giving, Sandra told the same story. She added, “I never used a wheelchair again.” That was a turning point for her. She started to become a leader in nursing and childbirth.
Sandra and I were to have profound work together in the field of childbirth, where change was deeply needed.
THE BIRTH OF CALM BIRTH
Somewhere in the middle of 1998 it dawned upon me that the most important use of vase breathing meditation was in childbirth. There was an ah-ha moment. I believed it could be a magnificent childbirth method and I had a good way to find out. Two of my closest friends and associates were
Sandra Bardsley, RN, LM, and JoAnn Walker, RN. Sandra had been a nurse administrator who became a midwife. She had delivered more than a thousand children. Then, after she recovered from her accident, she was one of the founders of Doulas of North America (DONA). JoAnn had been supervisor of nursing at Ashland Community Hospital and at Merci/Mt. Shasta Medical Center, where she had set up a new OB program. Both Sandra and JoAnn believed in meditation and were very supportive of the use of vase breathing in childbirth preparation. They learned the practice and worked with me to develop an audioguide of the method. I named the program and the audioguide Calm Birth. http://calmbirth.org
Donna Worden was very helpful with everything in the beginning of the Calm Birth program and she did an excellent job recording the two childbirth meditations, Womb Breathing and the reclining meditation, Practice of Opening.
When the audioguide was ready we scheduled initial trainings at the Smullin Center, in the fall of 1998, assisted by Tom Ewald, OB/GYN
from Ashland Community Hospital (ACH). JoAnn was the first director of Calm Birth. Both JoAnn and Sandra were on the Medigrace Board of directors.
One of our first hospital programs got a nice bit of press. The Ashland Tidings did a feature on Calm Birth called “The Miracle of Calm Birth”, with a beautiful color photo of a pregnant woman meditating.
At ACH, Tom Ewald tried to get the birthing center to specialize in Calm Birth. He made quite a strong presentation to the assembled OBs (he said), and had enough support, but a cool hand up in nursing administration blocked it. Still it was a sign of live beginnings for a program that had a long way to go.
I began a study of the pre-and perinatal psychology literature. I was told that I had to know the work of David Chamberlain, William Emerson, Thomas Verny, and others. They were deeply involved with an organization called the Association of Pre-and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), an important organization working to improve childbirth in the world.
[Today (2014) David, William, and Thomas are friends of mine and are on our Board of Advisors, and our own Sandra Bardsley is President of APPPAH.] https://birthpsychology.com/
DANCE AND LAUGHTER AT A WEST COAST THRONE
In July, 1997, just as the Calm Birth program was getting underway I heard that Thinley Norbu Rinpoche was at Tarchin Rinpoche’s retreat center in the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz mountains of California, to preside over the magnificent 8 day Dudjom Seven Treasures retreat, and that the Gesar dances were going to be performed. I packed my Gesar robe and my sword and drove south 8 hours to Tarchin Rinpoche’s Dudjom Tersar center. He had been Dudjom Rinpoche’s assistant at one point, and Tarchin Rinpoche and I had been close since his earliest days in America.
When I got there instead of finding a large group of people around Thinley Norbu in a throne, no one was to be found. I drove around slowly in my car, then stopped and got out. Another car came up even more slowly and started to pass me. It was Thinley Norbu, in dark glasses. I bowed. His car stopped. He got out and came directly to me, “I know you,” he exclaimed. I said, “You’re right, Rinpoche. Take a good look. It’s Robert Newman.”
Yes. He was glad to see me. I said “When are you going to give me dzogchen teachings?” He said, “You’re still too fast. You’re like my son, Dzonsar Khyentse. Still too fast.” Later, Rinpoche sat in the main throne for hours, with a glass of red wine in front of him, mostly silent, with variously more and less people present. At one point he said, in the silence, “Robert Newman is here. He has tried to help me with my health. That was good.”
The next day Rinpoche sat in the throne mostly silent all day, but a few times he spoke such teachings as can make the buddhas rejoice. At one quiet time I went up to him and handed him a terma scripture from Dudjom Rinpoche, a health and fortune practice, Khandro Norla. I asked him to please read the transmission as a blessing for those who were present. He made some remark in Tibetan. I echoed something back that sounded like Tibetan to me but I must have spoken the wrong magic word.
“Stupid!” said Rinpoche loudly, actually louder than he wanted. I thought, “Good; maybe that will wake me up.” He made a quick skillful correction:
“I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t love you so much.” Then he said one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. He said, “And when I’m in your court you can sit in the throne and call me stupid.” That was a superb act of skillful humor. That was funny smart.
The next day came the Gesar dances. A dance platform was erected in front of Rinpoche’s throne. I had done about 3 hours of rehearsal with the group of 10 people in the 2 days I’d been there, under Lin Lerner’s direction. In full costume, ever feeling comfortable in the grand gold robe, I approached Rinpoche at the throne before the dance. I asked him what he thought of the Gesar dances. He said, “Oh Tibetan dances are boring.” Good challenge.
The dance got underway and Tulku Adam and I busted out as a strong lead duo which brought the whole group out in good energetic form. I know they do a big dance in Orissa, and they sing in Tibetan better than Adam and Lin and me, but that day we brought out some kind of new American virtue, a noble and powerful dance in which after years of commitment we were realizing the transmission.
After the dance, sweating and smiling, I approached Thinley Norbu again. “What did you think of that?” I asked. “Great,” he said strongly. “You keep this energy in the Dharma.”
But I didn’t. Others would come in to perform the Gesar dances. Most of my energy was to go into trying to raise the quality of health in childbirth and to realize the potential of new childbirth practice.
THE FIRST CALM BIRTHS
After our first Calm Birth seminars at the RVMC Smullin Center in Medford, an OB doctor at RVMC arranged for JoAnn and I to give a one hour breakfast talk on the benefits of childbirth meditation in the main conference room in the hospital. The announcement went out to the combined OB departments of RVMC and Providence Medford Medical Center (PMMC).
At that point we didn’t even have a power point presentation. I tried to talk about the research in the biological and psychological benefits of meditation at the Harvard Medical School and UMMC, but mostly the audience was stone faced while they stuffed down gooy pastries with their coffee. I asked, “Who has read anything about mind/body medicine and energy medicine?” In the silence we could hear them chew and swallow. But afterwards we quickly enough learned how to present well at various California and Oregon hospitals, and at international conferences.
JoAnn and Colleen Graham, Sandra’s close associate, offered a Calm Birth class every Wednesday night at Ashland Community Hospital in 1997. Our first birth happened through that class, and it was a real challenge.
Linda Harris, the OG/GYN at RVMC who arranged our talk at the hospital,
sent one of her patients to us to see if we could help her. She came into
our Wednesday class at ACH rolling an IV pole. She spoke to JoAnn about her complex medical history and why the hospital wanted her to abort the child. Among a massive amount of medical problems complicated by an extensive history of medications, at the age of 37 Marie had only one fallopian tube, remaining from a cancer surgery, and it seemed impossible that she could get pregnant. Marie and her husband Lee thought the pregnancy was “a miracle”.
When Linda Harris read Marie the riot act about all the dangers, Marie insisted that she and Lee wanted the child more than she could say, and she asked Linda Harris if there was some way she could birth with her energy body.
And so she came to us. She was one of the best practitioners we’ll ever have. She would stay in the bathtub for 4 and 5 hours at a time listening to the meditation audiocassette again and again. Lee did it with her much of the time. Marie was telling her friends about it.
As far as RVMC was concerned Marie’s birth was going to be a technological event they had tried to avoid, and they focused on sending Marie up to Portland to a hospital with even more technical facilities for the birth. Then Marie began labor prematurely. She called me from the hospital. I got there in 15 minutes and we calmed it all way down. Then we went to the birthing room they had ready for her. We were alone.
Marie and I sat on the bed and looked around. We saw that they had an audiocassette player and a sound system, with speakers around the room.
I gave Marie an extra copy of the Calm Birth audioguide. First we spoke to the baby, Emily Rose, asking her to please be patient. We prayed to Emily.
I told Marie that if JoAnn or I couldn’t be present for the birth, if it did happen preterm, to be sure to play the audio cassette in the birthing room.
That way she would control the atmosphere, quiet the nurses and doctors, and give birth with Womb Breathing.
And so she did. Emily was three weeks premature, and on May 2nd, 1999, she was born in Marie’s RVMC birthing room with the Calm Birth audioguide coming from all four speakers. In Marie’s own words:
“The contractions didn’t start being strong until about midnight, and then she was born at 6:25 in the morning, so it was a short and easy labor because of Womb Breathing. There were times that the pains would get bad enough that I forgot Womb Breathing. They had me pant like a puppy, and all that did was make me feel like I was hyperventilating. So I remembered the Calm Birth teaching from the Calm Birth guide, and that helped me through labor immensely.”
Clee was a 22 year old mother of two children who was pregnant with her third child and had been unsuccessfully seeking a method of childbirth meditation. Clee and her young husband Austin had little education but were relatively enlightened. In her 9th month she changed midwives after meeting one named Rhixone who had taken two Calm Birth trainings.
Since Clee was so late in her pregnancy Rhixone suggested that Clee call me directly. She was trained, using the audioguide, in both the Practice of Opening and Womb Breathing. She bought the audio cassette to practice at home with her husband. What happened was that Clee proved that you can make important use of childbirth meditation even as a late intervention. It turned out that Clee was 8 days from giving birth, and by her account the methods we taught her gave her the triumphant birth experience she reported:
“I was very conscious of my breath throughout, the whole way. While I was going on a journey inside myself the breath was the physical manifestation of the other part that was helping me remain open, helping me to be flexible and open. It was the breath…It was really great. It was beautiful. It was wonderful. It all went smoothly. It was really calm. She came out and was just sitting there and I rubbed her back. It was a really peaceful space for her to come into. Everything had been peaceful”.
Austin: “Clee was really able to handle the intensity of the energy [Clee comments: “Yes.”] She was able to handle and harness it rather than fighting it because it is literally like the universe is being poured through the mother giving birth. Clee let the energy flow rather than being afraid of it, like in her previous two births. At one point one of the midwives commented that she had been doing childbirth for a long time and “it was a great day for other women across the world giving birth because they could tap into the energy that Clee was experiencing.”
Hannah Leigh was born 9/26/99.
DRAMA AT THE MEDICAL EDUCATION CENTER
In November 1999 there was a big buzz in the OB world of Southern Oregon hospitals. The famous and feared Marsden Wagner, reproduction scientist for the World Health Organization (WHO), was coming with his staff to address the OB community. They came three days early and went with legal sanction into the records of the four hospitals in our domain.
When I drove into the Smullin center parking lot I was impressed. Every spot was taken. The lobby was alive with energy. WHO representatives were handing out literature that was shocking to the local OB people. Inside, the main auditorium was jammed, with extra people standing. And Marsden made the show powerful.
First he projected the summary of the statistics they had gathered from the local hospitals. Well now, here we are in nice Southern Oregon and there is the same overuse of surgery and drugs in childbirth seen as a serious problem all through America. Some of the OB people in the audience showed their emotion. Some cried, others were clearly red-faced.
For instance there was Misoprostol (Cytotec) for labor induction, used in more that 70% of births in USA hospitals. It is a violent and toxic drug which the manufacturer has warned about for years. Doctors use it to control the timing of the birth, to push the child out violently in a shortened labor. It is extremely painful so that drugs and anesthesia are used with it.
To quote WHO: “Doctors do not inform women of the experimental nature of cytotec for labor induction. Thus doctors who give cytotec are experimenting on women without informed consent.” – in 70% of American births.
After Marsden’s presentation was over there was pandemonium. I headed out into the night energized. WHO was a de-facto supporter of the Calm Birth method. Everyone knew that the whole American OB medical establishment was seriously impacted by law suits. The whole “industry” was challenged, and it was certainly time to advance new childbirth practice.
THE LIFE VASE AND THE WOMB
Throughout human history, in several major meditation science traditions, like Tai Chi, Qi Kung, Hindu yoga, and Buddhist yoga, people were taught that they had an energy body in the physical body, and they were taught
to breathe vital energy from the air into a center in the navel of the energy body. In China that center is called the Tan-tien. In Japan it’s called the Hara, vital center. In the Buddhism of Tibet it was called the Vase of Life.
Throughout history though mostly men practiced breathing energy into the navel center in the energy body, some women also did the practice. When they breathed energy into their navel center they were breathing it to right where their womb was. If they were pregnant they knew they were practicing a wonderful kind of prenatal child development. The life vase and the womb are very close, almost inside each other, and when a pregnant woman breathes vital energy into her life vase she is breathing it to her child. The child is aware of that.
Vase breathing as a method of childbirth preparation has been available to us for centuries. If we turn to it now as an integrated mind/body and energy body practice, we have an excellent model based on centuries of meditation science. Our participation in the world congresses of APPPAH helped us mature and professionalize the program. David Chamberlain, a former president of APPPAH and a superb writer helped us start to develop the Calm Birth literature. My first two papers, Childbirth Meditation and Toward a New Era of Childbirth Education were published in the APPPAH journal (JOPPPAH) in 2003 and 2004.
We made important progress with the medical establishment. Sutter Health Care, California’s largest health care provider, responded positively to our program. They offered us the use of conference rooms in their hospitals and promoted our trainings. Our focus shifted to California for the next couple of years. Two members of the APPPAH board of advisors, David Chamberlain and William Emerson lived in Northern California, and supported our work. The next three APPPAH world congresses would he held in San Francisco, and would be important to the development of Calm Birth.
Before 1999 was over:
JoAnn and I presented the first Calm Birth hospital-based teacher training at Sutter Santa Rosa Medical Center;
we were contacted by the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), the foremost American research organization in support of the advance of a new medical paradigm; (That was the beginning of our work with IONS.)
and I’d begun work on the Calm Birth book.
MEDIGRACE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
I married Whitney Wolf at the turn of the millennium, and she was very helpful with everything.
In the spring I received a phone call from my friend Bhaka Tulku. He said that he was staying with Steven Segal, the movie actor, on Segal’s 100,000 acre ranch facing Mount Shasta, north of the mountain. Rinpoche said he had been hired by Segal to teach him Tibetan (and Dharma, I imagine). Rinpoche said that he wanted me to come and see him the next morning.
We would do a fire offering up on one of Segal’s hills. His secretary gave me directions to Segal’s ranch where someone would bring Whitney and I up to meet Bhaka Tulku on the hill. That was about 45 minutes south of Ashland.
Segal’s property was immense. It had seven lakes and many hills, and many juniper trees, which Tibetan’s love. Bhakha Tulku seemed to think it was as good or better than Tibet, that maybe he should build his ultimate retreat house on one of Steven’s lakes, with spectacular views of the sacred mountain. However, Rinpoche knew that Steven was complex and demanding, so first he had to get clear about teaching the first famous Hollywood actor tulku, the one who was discovered to be a reincarnated Tibetan lama.
Yes indeed, quite a story. Segal the actor who kills and maims many people in every movie he makes, who is known to hurt some of the actors who work with him, who in every movie is the cop or military commando good guy who kills to make a better world, he gets discovered to be the reincarnation of a Tibetan tulku by none other than Penor Rinpoche, then the new head of the Nyingma lineage. Segal was widely known for his powerful ego, and to put a tulku crown on that head bothered a lot of people.
Up on Segal’s hill with Bhakha Tulku we did fire puja. Then we sat and talked for about an hour as Rinpoche kept tossing blue juniper berries at my face, trying to hit the center of my eyeglass. When he did he was startled and pleased. He asked me to perform a Gesar dance for him. About 7 people were present. I did the offering presentation to Rinpoche as the presiding lama. It was a privilege to offer a few of the old moves to a pure tulku, a real reincarnated Buddha.
I had with me my terma phurba, which Bhaka Tulku kept trying to take away from me. I let him wear it on his hip under his robe as we drove back to Segal’s big ranch house. Bhaka Tulku and I were standing talking under a tree when suddenly Segal emerged from his house, a very big and macho guy, flanked by two mean looking mastiff dogs and followed lightly by two small disciples.
Bakha Tulku whispered to me, “Here comes the important person. Watch out.” Segal had noticed Bhaka Tulku and me and was heading our way. I made eye contact with him and held his eyes with my cool gaze as he walked right up to me and made a sweeping formal bow, offering me his hand. Bhaka Tulku said, “This is Robert Newman. He’s a teacher.” Steven made a gesture of acknowledgement. I said I was also the director of an organization working to advance the use of new kinds of medicine. I said the name, Medigrace. I gave him my card. Then he turned away and started to leave.
I decided to get his attention. I called out to him, “Rinpoche.” I knew that would seduce him. He turned and looked at me. I reached inside Bhaka Tulku’s robe and took out my terma phurba. I held it up with a strong hand directly between Steven and I. “Have you ever seen a terma phurba?” I asked? He walked directly toward me, coming head on into the force field of my upheld phurba.
It was a good movie. Bhaka Tulku was chuckling quietly. Steven stopped in front of me. I did not offer to let him touch the phurba, the terma magic dagger, not made by human hands. He said, “Terma phurbas are the most interesting thing to me on the planet now.” I told him that it was the force behind my work in the field of medicine. He said he’d like to help us raise money for Medigrace. He left, and Whitney and I left.
Back in Ashland I called Gyatrul Rinpoche, who was very close to Penor Rinpoche, concerning the tulkuness of Steven Segal. Clearly Gyatrul Rinpoche respected the decision of Penor Rinpoche. I asked Rinpoche if Segal could help raise money for Medigrace. Rinpoche was very sensitive and smart. He said, “Maybe you should help Steven Segal.”
MORE SCENES WITH THE BAD ACTOR INCARNATION
We went back to visit with Steven about two weeks later. He had a jet airplane and flew between Hollywood and an air strip near the ranch almost once a week. I was interested in figuring him out. I approached him as a recognized tulku. I gave him gifts of precious substance from Dudjom Rinpoche and Khyentse Rinpoche. It turned out that he had been empowered in some practices, mostly Dudjom Tersar. He was very interested in the Vajrakilaya practice, but he would need a huge amount of teaching.
He says he went to China as a young man to study medicine, and got into the martial arts through that. We all know he was a recognized Aikido master in Japan, but before that the picture is hazy. He started to call me “brother” and called Whitney “darlin’. He told me he thought he’d been poisoned. He thought his pituitary gland was affected. I felt that he needed a lot of good bodywork and a retreat in Amitayus practice to heal his life force. I thought I could do the bodywork and set him up in Amitayus practice and vase breathing, but we just left it as a suggestion.
A month later I got a call from him on the movie set of his bad cop movie “Exit Wounds.” I asked him how he was doing. He said he was in hell realm. He sounded glum. I said that it must be hard to pretend to kill people and beat them up all the time. I asked him if his agent couldn’t get him a comedy role. He perked up. “I’d love to do comedy,” he said. I mentioned his comic film The Giant, in which he played a caricature of himself. “That’s the most fun I had in any movie I ever made,” he said.
I said, “Steven, I got it. Get me a part in your next movie, and I’ll hang out with you. I’ll act like a new kind of magician in the film.” Steven said, “That’s a great idea.” A few minutes later he repeated that he liked my idea, but we never did it. I was bull-shitting him anyhow.
CALM BIRTH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN MEDICAL SCHOOL
Through the Calm Birth website I was contacted by Frank Anderson, OB/GYN in research at the respected University of Michigan Medical School. Frank was a student of Zen, loved children, had three sons,
and was impressed with our effort to introduce meditation into childbirth.
He arranged for me to offer a seminar under the sponsorship of the medical school.
I recalled that the University of Michigan had been in the forefront of research into the potential benefits of meditation. Psychologist Basu Babchi of the University of Michigan Medical Center, with his associate M.A. Wenger of UCLA, went to India several times in the 1950s, with increasingly better equipment, to study yogis. I’m smiling about that but it was important research.
There were 45 people at the UM Medical School seminar, mostly doulas, nurses, and midwives, but also the dean of the College of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, and several people from Frank Anderson’s staff.
It was a lively and enjoyable seminar, and it looked possible that Frank could help us with our research program. The Institute of Noetic Sciences wanted to help with that also. But Calm Birth was still a small nonprofit program and we had a long way to go.
LIVING THEATER AT THE CHILDBIRTH WORLD CONGRESS
The next several years were full of trainings, coast to coast, and one trip to Venezuela to teach with Eva Gundberg, OB/GYN. There was a Calm Birth seminar at Bastyr University in Seattle, and there were two presentations at APPPAH world congresses. The APPPAH congress in San Diego, November, 2005, was a most joyful and fulfilling event for me in the history of Calm Birth, and a turning point.
For the third congress in succession, with all the smart leaders and educators in childbirth in the world available for the few precongress and postcongress workshops, I was offered a 4 hour prime time postcongress workshop the afternoon the congress ended. I was honored. However my workshop was scheduled at the same time as a workshop by Ina May Gaskin, the most celebrated midwife ever, who was being given a major award at the congress. That felt like unfair competition, but before I arrived in San Diego I knew that there was good enrollment for the Calm Birth workshop and they were giving us a beautiful room.
After 6 years of work the Calm Birth book was published, just in time for the congress, by North Atlantic Books, publisher of David Chamberlain’s The Mind of Your Newborn Baby, one of the most successful books in the pre-and perinatal field. David wrote the foreword to my book. David was the heart of APPPAH, former President, Board member, and he brought me into the heart of a wonderful new family that has enriched my life.
What was most wonderful was what the childbirth leaders were saying about the Calm Birth method. The words of Christian Northrup, Jeannine Parvati Baker, David Chamberlain, William Emerson, and others on the cover of the book and inside were like magic to me. I had envisioned the importance of the life vase in childbirth, and now some of the most respected educators in the field strongly supported our program. That was and is blessed magic to me.
Also, just before I arrived in San Diego the third edition of the Calm Birth
audioguide was published, a big achievement for the program. After the original audiocassette that David Chamberlain praised in 1999, and then the first CD version in 2003, the third production of the transmission of the practices in 2005 with Dara Knerr’s wonderful voice is the heart of the Calm Birth program. The language of transmission developed in the texts is true to the Tibetan teachers and was refined by more than a dozen childbirth professionals working with me over the 6 years of development. At the San Diego APPPAH congress it was offered on a world class stage.
Chairman of the congress that year was Bruce Lipton, the lively and famous cell biologist. Before the congress, my workshop had been accepted but Bruce was hard to reach and I needed to communicate. Then I heard he was in the South Pacific near where the great tragic tsunami struck. There was a long silence, and then I got an email from him! “Robert! Don’t worry, I didn’t die! I wasn’t even near it! In a week we can chat!”.
I first met Bruce when he was up on the stage giving a power point presentation on the nurture-versus-nature understanding of cell biology, introducing mind/body science at an elemental biological level. He talked with an energetic style, excited by what he was saying. He rocked the APPPAH audience.
Afterwards I went right up onto the stage to speak to Bruce, and closed in on him just as ten women did. In fact so many people came up on the little stage at once that we came together in a mass around Bruce, with me pushed right up against him. Then the mass shifted a little and as I talked with him he was being forced back off the edge of the platform. Fortunately I put my arm around his back and held him securely on the stage while we finished up our little meeting. I helped Bruce secure his space and I left.
At that congress were Marsden Wagner, Thomas Verny, Ina May Gaskin, Eva Gundberg, David Chamberlain, William Emerson, Sandra Bardsley, and other people whose work in the pre-and perinatal literature I had studied to make sure the Calm Birth language was based on that.
The workshop was in a large graceful room. We had 17 people including Eva Gundberg, Laura Uplinger (chairman of the following congress), Marcy Axness, Jeffrey Kaufman, MD, who assisted me, and David Chamberlain was there to introduce the program. The women were superb and charged with the energy and intelligence of the congress. Our program was as alive as can be.
Saturday night there was a dinner/dance celebration. William Emerson and I had dinner together and started to exchange jokes. Finally I said, William, here it is, the best dirty joke I ever heard:
“Julie is a very nice young American girl. She’s just graduated from a good college and she goes to Europe for 2 weeks with 5 of her sorority sisters. While they’re in Athens, Greece, visiting the fabled remains of the Parthenon, Julie meets a handsome older Greek gentlemen, Karin Parto, who was with his mother. Karin spoke perfect English and told Julie and her friends stories about the Parthenon. Then he asked her out for lunch the next day, and she agreed.
The lunch became something more. Something happened. Julie returned to New York, to stay with her parents and to find a job. And one week later Karin calls; he’s in New York!
He courts her. He does everything right. Brings tasteful presents for her parents. Karin seems to have no financial pressure. He stays in a nice hotel and sees Julie often. They fall in love. They decide to get married. It’s really wonderful. But the day of the wedding Julie’s mom takes her aside and says, “Julie, he’s a nice man and I can see you’re in love, but remember, he’s Greek. As some point he’s going to ask you to roll over for him, you’ll see.” Julie says, “Don’t worry mom. I know what you’re saying. I can take care of myself.”
So they have a nice wedding and a great honeymoon. Sex is good, sex is normal, no problem. Then, a couple of months later they’re having sex and Karin sweetly says to her, “Julie, my darling, won’t you please turn over for me?” And Julie says, “No! Not that! Mother warned me.”
Karin leans toward her and even more sweetly whispers, “What’s the matter my darling? Don’t you want to have children?”
William and I both roared. In general, people comment on the warmth that characterizes the APPPAH congresses. APPPAH had nurtured Calm Birth and gave a small program the support that made a difference.
Following are the endorsements on the back of the Calm Birth book. Several of them come from people who were at that congress:
“Calm Birth is a sublime gift to all of us. It contains the blueprint for reconnecting with birth wisdom on all levels. Reading through this book and doing the practices will transform the birth process and imprint a peaceful beginning in both mother and child. The positive impact of this on society can’t be overestimated.”
Christiane Northrup, MD; author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom and Mother-Daughter Wisdom
“…..based on meditation and the best principles of established psychosomatic medicine….Calm Birth compassionately guides mothers-to-be and new mothers through carefully structured relaxation and meditation practices…An empowering alternative to the “medicalization of birth”, the techniques liberate women to channel their innate wisdom into welcoming their new-born child in a truly life-affirming way.”
Thomas R. Verny, MD, DPsych, founder of APPPAH, author of Tomorrow’s Baby and The Secret Life of the Unborn Child.
“Calm Birth is the childbirth method that society and I have waited for. It’s been a long time coming, a very long time. I am a midwife and an educator, with a steady devotion to childbirth. …Calm Birth does what is so deeply needed. It heals the Earth by healing birth.”
Jeannine Parvati Baker, author of Prenatal Yoga and Natural Childbirth and
Conscious Conception
There are 4 more such endorsements worth praying for on and in Childbirth Meditation, and there are more on the website: www.calmbirth.org
A STAR GIVES BIRTH
In 2004 Medigrace/CalmBirth moved 40 miles north of Ashland to Grants Pass because people from Grants Pass were on the Medigrace board, Ruth Miller, our Secretary, and Herb Grade, our treasurer, and because I found a sweet place to live nearby with big trees and a creek.
About a month after Medigrace moved to Grants Pass I was speaking to a nurse educator at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene and I mentioned our relocation. She said, “Oh you must know Tanja Johnson.” I said no. She said, “I can’t believe you don’t know each other. Tanja Johnson is a rising star in the field of childbirth and she has gotten your local hospital, Three Rivers Community Hospital, to be the only mother-friendly rated hospital birthing center in the world. That’s the only hospital in the world in compliance with the World Health Organization’s mother-friendly rating.” She said that Tanja and I had to meet.
And so we did, in Tanja’s office in the best birthing center on the planet, in Medigrace’s new home town. Within two months Tanja was on the Medigrace board of directors. She was good friends with Marsden Wagner and Michele Odent from childbirth congresses, so she brought us some great connections. Tanja was audacious and lively and bright as can be, and a gifted student of vase breathing. She had wanted to learn meditation, and she totally believed in the Calm Birth method.
I gave her a copy of the unfinished manuscript of the Calm Birth book. Her close friend the Florida midwife Sandi Blankenship visited her and read my manuscript with excitement. Within a few months Tanja became pregnant for the first time in her life, with Greg, a man who she had a good relationship with. She was 33 years old. Imagine how important that was to her, given her position. She decided to prepare with the Calm Birth practices to demonstrate the method to her hospital. That was magic to my ears.
Tanja had cervical surgery when she was 25 years old so there was some concern about the function of her cervix as she prepared for natural childbirth with Womb Breathing meditation and neuromuscular release.
She chose Sandi as her midwife. It was a joy to be with Tanja while she was pregnant. We decided to give a joint presentation to introduce Calm Birth to Grants Pass, and to promote it we did an hour program on the radio, throughout Southern and Central Oregon. It was fun working together that way. She was some kind of blessing for the Calm Birth program.
She went to term with the pregnancy with no problems, practicing Womb Breathing and Practice of Opening, with Greg participating fully, and she worked her full schedule managing the birthing center up to where it was time to call Sandi in Florida and ask her to get on a plane. Tanya was close to being in labor and stayed home. The hospital went wild. They considered her a high risk pregnancy, not a normal birth, and their business was to take control of that.
Three OB doctors got into an argument about which one had priority to perform the emergency c-section they all agreed Tanja needed immediately. She kept getting uptight phone calls from the hospital, from doctors and nurses, insisting that she get to the hospital or they would send an ambulance. Tanja stopped answering the phone and stayed with Womb Breathing as the contractions came and went. The birth was taking it’s time and Tanja was doing it her way. Greg was with her breath after breath.
Sandi got there when Tanja was 4cm dilated. She stayed with deep Womb Breathing, moving around as needed, in and out of the squatting position.
Sandi checked the temperature in the tub and they communicated. But with all the hospital tension in the air the labor stalled at 4cm for hours and hours. Tanja and Sandi were calm, staying with the practice, but they felt the pressure coming from the hospital. Finally they got into the car and drove a mile and a half to the birthing center, which was highly expectant of Tanja’s arrival.
She went into a birthing room and bedlam broke out. She told me that two doctors were arguing with her as to who was in charge and there was competition among the l & d nurses to be involved. Tanja rose up with the force in her lungs, “Get the fuck out! All of you except Sandi and Sue!
Out!” and they did clear out.
Tanja and Sandi and Sue took a deep breath and smiled. Tanja got her timing back and relaxed. She did energy breathing throughout. Sue was security guard and very helpful. It took a few hours but Tanja gave birth to a big girl, Patricia, with wide open eyes, and so a star gave birth.
CALM HEALING: METHODS FOR A NEW ERA OF MEDICINE
After giving birth, with Greg’s help Tanja continued to try to manage the birthing center. Greg brought the infant to the hospital twice a day to breast feed so Tanja could keep her position.
But the baby became irritable and Greg was feeling stressed. He had left an excellent business position to be with Tanja through the last trimester of the pregnancy and through the birth. He was offered a good job in Orlando, Florida. Tanja said, “Take it. I have to leave the hospital. We’ll move there.” and so they did.
Within weeks the hospital lost its mother-friendly rating, and at present no hospital in the world complies with the standards defined by WHO. But Tanja was a great help to us, and Sandi is now a Calm Birth teacher.
In 2005, with the partnership of Dr. Ruth Miller, we did extensive research and development for my other book on meditation and the medical establishment, Calm Healing. Ruth was a scientist, a sharp researcher, a leading teacher in the New Thought tradition, and an accomplished writer who had published several books. I had drafted about 50 pages on the emergence of mind/body medicine and the use of meditation science in western medicine. I asked Ruth to work with me to develop a central chapter on a new model of the human body, and chapters on states of consciousness in illness, a new model of illness, and a new model of healing. Tall task? Ruth was more than up to it.
I had started the Calm Healing book years ago, but the Calm Birth program came to life and took all my energy. Ruth came in like some kind of angel, became Secretary of the Medigrace board of directors, strengthened the Board, established our grant writing program, and negotiated three new contracts for Medigrace with North Atlantic Books, including partnership contracts on our three cds. Then she partnered with me on the Calm Healing book, with the full support of Richard Grossinger, publisher of North Atlantic Books. The bombs were still ticking and I was making progress on a path of my own.
SACRED MOVEMENT FOR CHILDBIRTH.
Karin Pedersen and I became friends when I first moved to Ashland.
Karin had been a direct student of Carlos Castaneda and the powerful shaman women he was trained with. She had learned and was teaching the Magical Passes, movement exercises the seers used for self-development. I was interested in the series of Magical Passes for the womb. Karin was very interested in my many years of work with Tibetan teachers, and my work in the hospitals.
She taught self-empowerment seminars for women, with sacred movement as the pivotal work. She taught women to find their deep power dance. We stayed close through the years. And then one day after I moved to Grants Pass Karin called and said that after all this time she still wanted to learn vase breathing. She asked if she could come visit me to learn the practice in order to teach it. I said sure. She also wanted to make a video of the teaching. I said good. That was the beginning of 2 DVD projects with Karin.
Some of the Calm Birth teachers had asked about movement practices for the program. We set up a get-together at Karin’s house in Talent, just north of Ashland. Ruth Miller and Tanja Johnson came with me to meet her and to see some movements. The three women were a powerful field together. Karin demonstrated what she meant as sacred movement, and she showed us two of the Magical Passes for the womb. Ruth and Tanja loved her and thought she was a natural for the Calm Birth program.
Karin decided to make a dvd for Calm Birth. She would present Empowerment of the Womb, sacred movement and Magical Passes that work with vase breathing. And so we did. The dvd is used in the teacher training programs. Karin is a very capable body-work professional. For years she’s taken the pains out of my aging body in exchange for vase breathing training.
Maybe the most radical aspect of vase breathing is that instead of thinking of the external world as supremely dangerous and disturbing you practice breathing vital energy from the universal field, so that the external field is always life-giving source.
MY POWERFUL BUDDHA GARDEN STATUE
So Medigrace had its business office in Grants Pass from 2004 and I lived in Hugo, 11 miles outside of GP, from 2004-7. I lived in a house on the 28 acre property of my close friends Dan Rowe and Joan Kalvelage. Dan had lived on the property for 32 years, building the main house down below, with the help of friends and some contractors. Then Dan and others started to build the house I lived in. After 30 years and much work it still needed work. Dan helped me with many things, and I was happy there, with my computer, for several years, as the Calm Birth program came to life in the world. Both the Calm Birth and Calm Healing books were written in that house.
One day Dan was helping me cut off some dead limbs from trees overhanging the house. We were outside on the deck that Dan had built, and in the middle of the deck, raised on cylinder blocks and a small wood platform, sat a classic white Zen buddha statue, one of the most perfect cement buddha statues it’s possible to find, a big one, about 28 inches high. Dan was sawing at a big dead limb with a tall pole saw, and it looked like it would be safe to cut the limb off. It should have fallen directly down the side of the tree, like the last one we cut. The buddha seemed out of harm’s way.
I took over the sawing after Dan’s arm got tired, until there was a big crack and groan and the limb broke off of its own weight. But to our shock it didn’t fall as planned, and the heavy end of the branch somehow flipped over and headed directly toward the statue. Then about 6 feet from the statue the limb suddenly flipped backwards, landing off the deck, near the bottom of the tree, just the way we planned.
We were dumbfounded. What it looked like to both of us identically was that the trajectory of the limb was hard to understand. It was headed right for the statue and then it looked like it got whacked over backwards, with force and sound, as it invaded the space of the statue and was blown away.
Ask Dan. That’s what we saw but what did we see? No I don’t believe there was a protective force field around the statue that smacked back that big branch. I think it was the lucky physics of the fall of a big complex limb – but I’d be dumb to count out the possibility that the statue did it. I think Dan would go with that too.
OUTRAGEOUS FUNERAL, OR A LIVE NEW KIND OF SERVICE?
Over the years I’ve performed a few marriages, and once I led a unique funeral service.
The person who died, Bill, had suffered from MS for years. He was a small orange-red man born and bred in Scotland who progressively tilted more and more to his left, like the leaning tower of Pisa. I was one of his caregivers over the last year of his life. We became friends. He and his wife Sara had attended a class of mine at Providence Medical Center.
Bill and I used to take long car rides and he’d tell me stories from when he was in the Air Force and flew big planes. Then he became an engineer for Gillette razor blades his entire working life. He had little sense of humor but I had no trouble amusing him. He was softer than soft and I called him Blade. I tried to teach him how to box, which amused him and his wife greatly. Then one day she called to say that he had died and she wanted me to do the funeral service.
The service was held in the chapel of the largest funeral home in Ashland. We had excellent bag-pipe musicians resounding at both entrances to the chapel, for 30 minutes, until about 70 people were seated and the doors were closed. When silence had completely formed, I enjoyed the quiet of it, for several long seconds, until I felt some people getting edgy with so much silence and Bill in his coffin to my left.
I began nicely enough speaking about Bill’s life and family, who were present, and then I told stories from my friendship with Bill, which really sounded nice. And then I heard myself say, “I once told Bill that I swore to him that you didn’t die when you die. I told him you’re still awake. So we’ve put a live microphone in Bill’s coffin in case he wants to comment on anything.”
No one laughed, yet I couldn’t help but smile. After a few moments of silence I hit the start button on my boom-box and the magnificent sound of Mozart’s Requiem Mass filled the chapel. After about 30 seconds of that I hit the stop button. “That,” I said, “was the beginning of Mozart’s own funeral mass, a triumphant statement of life. Let it be Bill’s blessing on us.”
Then some loving written statements were read by Bill’s family.
Then I announced a reception at Bill and Sara’s house. At the reception I noticed a for-real Bible-packing Christian headed right at me. I sipped from my glass of wine and greeted him. He was very serious and pointed to a neat little fine-print Bible in his hand which he insisted that I take, for my own good. “What’s your problem?” I coyly asked him. “There are other ways of seeing these things,” he said. “Really?” I said. “That’s the most interesting thing I’ve heard today.” He got in a huff and went away.
CALM BIRTH IN NEW YORK?!
The last three years I’d lived in New York I contemplated the sheer massiveness of the New York City hospital system. Set all along First Avenue, starting with the VA Hospital at 23rd Street going all the way up to Manhattan Hospital at 72nd Street was all hospitals. In the middle was the dreaded Belleview hospital, massive old red brick structures, for 12 solid blocks of New York, managing large patient populations as best they can from birth to death. And north of Belleview was New York University Medical Center, with its research division, in which Ted Wolff had fulfilled my technological prayers for years. But when I was trying to implement Medigrace programs in the medical establishment 1991-4 the physical massiveness of establishment medicine seemed like a hard wall to walk through. Back then I would never have thought of trying to present an advanced childbirth program in New York City.
I had been back to the big city several times since I left in 1995, mostly for family matters with my mother and sister. Medigrace had a wonderful associate in Manhattan, Beth Dannhauser, LPN, who had contacted us through IONS in 2000, and came across country to take our first teacher training, in Ashland, that year. Beth and her husband Steve made gifts to Medigrace for years that were essential to our progress. She had worked in the New York hospital system for a long time. Her husband’s law firm, one of the largest in the world, has done pro-bono legal services for us. Beth has been more interested in Medigrace as a whole than in the childbirth program.
Then in the fall of 2006 I was contacted by Judith Halek, one of New York’s most respected doulas, a gifted photographer, and a charismatic childbirth educator. She was interested in childbirth in the energy body. I sent her the Calm Birth cd. I was in New York for a family matter and I got together with Judith. It was new family at first sight. During our meeting her cell phone went off. She looked and said to me that she had to take the call.
“Yes, Marci. How’s it going?....uh huh. Contractions are how far apart? Uh huh. Have you used the Calm Birth CD I gave you?..... Good…… I see, you’ve been using it and it’s really working. Good. Keep me posted.” We both thought that was a good sign and decided that I would come back in early December and teach two 6 hour seminars, one for prenatal care and one for postnatal care.
And so we did. We had good groups, with many nurses. A highlight of the first seminar was a very pregnant woman who looked like she was going to give birth prematurely a couple of times during the seminar, but what saved the day was Womb Breathing. Great demo. Good class.
Out of that came the first teacher training in New York City, June, 2007, at the East-West Center on lower Fifth Avenue, three blocks from the Dudjom Center. Judith was ultra helpful and got to showcase her beautiful photography. 21 childbirth professionals attended, half of them nurses. As I gave the instructions on the yogic movements to set up breathing energy into the energy body, I thought that Shenphen Rinpoche would love to see this roomful of noble beings doing the traditional mudras with grace. Judith took excellent pictures, which Rinpoche has seen.
HOSPITAL HOME
Christine Novak and Billee Wolf came to that first New York teacher training, both of them experienced l&d nurses and doulas. Christine was also an educator. They both worked in New Jersey hospitals. In the fall of 2007 we did another teacher training in New York City, located in a building downtown connected to the Open Center. Judith was there again, becoming solid with the program, and Christine and Billee came again, along with a number of other nurses. Importantly, Christine brought three of her close associates from Overlook Hospital in Summit, New Jersey, including Amy Gole. That was an important step toward a shift in the Calm Birth program.
In 2008 and 2009 we focused on spring and fall teaching programs at Overlook. Overlook and its sister hospital Morristown Memorial together were called Atlantic Health and averaged a total of over 7,000 births per year. Christine has offered programs at both hospitals. In June, 2009, she received the March of Dimes Better-for-Baby award for bringing Calm Birth into the medical establishment in New Jersey. Later that year she became Regional Director of Calm Birth.
Just as one hospital in Paris was the long time center for the use of hypnosis in childbirth, and just as Lamaze had his own maternity facility, and as Michel Odent had his birthing center at Pithiers, Calm Birth needed a hospital birthing center as a home, and for several years Overlook was that.
Christine worked to define the teacher certification program, and with Judith she edited all Calm Birth documents for teaching and study. Judith’s photographs on the Calm Birth website are wish-fulfilling to me. Childbirth meditation is seen to be noble and peaceful. The pregnant woman sitting in meditation posture is a double Buddha. Compare her to the classical buddha statue. Judith’s photographs show women of various races practicing an ennobling form of childbirth preparation, a universal practice.
FAREWELL ESTELLE
My mother turned out to be a very good-looking woman who was self-involved, vain as can be, and limited in her giving. She was incommunicative, but she aggressively kept my sister near her, actively against Pat going away to college which Pat so much wanted. Sorry to say that much of my mother’s life could be defined in her control of Pat, via need of her and her want of her. And her relation to me can be seen as a statement of her inability to love.
The last 20 years or more of her life I did love my mother, I had that healing,
as I did with my father, true gratitude for giving me life and caring for me when I was young. In the last 20 years of Mom’s life Pat was helping them and caring for them but unhappy with years of their insensitive and sometimes bad treatment of her. And we have to add that there was something somewhat twisted with my mother and me. She strongly refused to say that she loved me, all the way through to her death at age 94. I would speak to her regularly and always reminded her that I loved her and she would respond with either thank you or nothing.
Once, about 10 years before her death, I was with Mom and Pat, trying to communicate with Mom, and she actually said that she refused to talk to me. I asked her why. She said that after I left home at age 17 to go to college things were never the same for her with me again. Pat said to her, “Mom, it’s normal for boys to leave home after high school.” My mother folded her arms and said nothing. She once did say she was proud of my books.
My sister assumed intensive responsibility for my mother’s care the last years of her long life. Estelle’s physical beauty did not diminish. She was careful with her make-up. Every one told her she was beautiful. She shrugged it off but it was clearly a great pleasure for her. When she died of stroke at age 94 in Florida, it was a merciful death in more ways than one. I’d become very concerned about stresses on my sister’s health from the increasingly demanding care needs of both my mother and Pat’s husband Bill. At the time my mother had the stroke I had agreed to come to Florida to take over her care and Bill’s care for a week so that Pat could have respite, get away to immerse herself in her children and grandchildren. But Mom died so quickly that Pat advised me not to come to Florida but to go to New York where they’d have the funeral in three days. My sister was under great stress. Bill’s health was terminal with cancer, heart failure, and other things. Pat had been treated twice for breast cancer and really needed rest.
At the family get together the night before the funeral I held Pat close to my side, and I made sure that the coffin was kept closed – that in spite of the fact that Mom no doubt looked good. Pat was such a nervous wreck that when I put my forehead on the coffin to feel my mother’s presence Pat strongly cautioned me to not knock the coffin over and spill out my mother. Oh the suffering of anxiety.
At the funeral, at the Newman family plot, where my mother had been frightened in the past, at my father’s death and on the few visits she was able to pay to his grave afterwards, I held my sister close. Pat’s daughter Elizabeth read a long heartfelt speech about her grandmother, idolizing her. Then a few prayers were said. The family expected me to do something.
I stepped forward to the edge of the grave, looking down over the coffin, and I sang Red Tara mantra, slowly, melodically, OM TARE TAM SO HA, with long, slow syllables, OM TARE TAM SO HA, as I cast Dudjom blessing rice on the coffin. There was the feeling of blessing in death.
First I sang Red Tara mantra and then I sang White Tara mantra, OM TARE TU TARE TURE SO HA, sending precious grains of saffron Dudjom blessing rice in small showers onto the golden oak coffin in the blazing sun. The blessing of the sacred feminine was on us and in us.
Still singing the melodic mantra, I stepped back to be at my sister’s side again. Then I said that almost everyone there, her blood family, owed their lives to Estelle. It was our time to express gratitude to her. We did. What Pat and I kept to ourselves, we do.
CALM BIRTH RETURNS TO ASHLAND
In 2007 we offered two teacher training programs in Ashland, at Jackson Wellsprings, spring and fall. Sandra Bardsley came to take the training after years of supporting Calm Birth and working with me. Maria Cassals, OB//GYN came from the Philippines. Those trainings were easy for me to offer since I lived nearby.
After the June/08 teacher training in New York City, attended by Judith, Christine, Amy Gole, Billee, Sandi Blankenship, and other nurses and educators I was looking forward to doing a teacher training at Jackson Wellsprings that fall. Registered for that training were several women who were stars to my eyes: Eva Gundberg, Laura Uplinger, Sandra Bardsley, Colleen Graham, Kari Marble, and Christine Novak. Karin Pederson was set to participate. Both Eva and Kari had worked with Karin before at a training I gave. This was bound to be something special.
What a power vat. Eva came all the way from Venezuela. Laura came from Southern California. Kari came from San Francisco, Christine came from New Jersey, Sandra came from Sacramento, and other women attended, including Colleen Graham. Colleen lives in Ashland, where she taught the Calm Birth method at Ashland Community Hospital with JoAnn in 1997.
The fall/08 teacher training in Ashland will remain a high point in the history of Calm Birth. Eva and Laura’s trilingual presences brought in an international field, and most of those present were so involved with APPPAH that our training was like an APPPAH mini-conference. We raised the intention to work together to shift the paradigm of childbirth into a better age of childbirth practice and health. And we felt the paradigm shift.
HOW TO STARTLE A GREAT BEAST AND SURVIVE
A doctor friend of mine in Ashland went to Alaska with his wife for a summer vacation. When they returned he told me this story with wide open eyes. I’ll never forget it. It became part of my life.
Tom and Maryann were walking in Alaskan woods, peacefully strolling along, when they suddenly came upon a great grizzly bear. It was about a hundred feet from where they were and it didn’t see them. They froze still as stone and watched the bear eat, afraid to move or make a sound. They caught their breath and watched the bear eat.
Then Tom decided to take a picture. He quietly took out his camera and raised it to his eye, pointed at the bear, focused, and then took the photo with a click of the shutter that made the great bear actually jump up frightened, standing up tall and screaming. He glared at Tom and Maryann who were locked together in a seizure of paralysis and terror.
Then the great beast astonished them further by continuing to stare at them and rage, as time stood still, and then they watched the bear turn and move away. When the doctor’s pulse came back to normal, as he pulled his fingers out of his wife’s arms, he knew that you could make every nerve in a 1200 pound bear jump and you could live to say so. “But the next time I meet a grizzly,” said Tom, “I’ll let the photo op pass. I hope Tom keeps finding ways to live when life gets dangerous.
DOCTOR DANCE
In 2010 I had a cardiovascular work-up that suggested substantial blockages in the main arteries of the heart of a 75 year old long on a low fat and vegetables diet. I didn’t know then that the diagnosis was completely wrong. I decided to use the wake-up call of the diagnosis to shock me to life. I decided to make use of the situation, to dissolve the blockages, and that can be done, more than one way at once.
Dance! I was made to dance. For years I’d been too physically inactive. I decided to take up dance immediately.
Iona helped me try out many good dance records, and then I hit on a Tina Turner album that was perfect for me, just rocking hot rhythms. I started out at 7 minutes of all out dance, and over two weeks got it up to thirty minutes of rock out nonstop dance a day. Sure you go easy to start and slowly bring up the swing. It helps make my day. I say it turned my life up. I’ve danced 30-35 minutes a night on through the summers, when I physically can, usually at night, even in the hot weather. There are also periods where back pain and/ or lack of energy doesn’t allow it.
But when I could, by 2010 I took to rocking in rhythmic swing high step to U2’s The Indescribable Fire, and the point is I have more vitality than I did when I first started dancing to step up, about 6 years ago. I just love to break out into up-tempo dance, when I can, at least a little each day, even if I have minimal energy or a sore back. And when I dance around this apartment I dance with the thankas in the meditation room – especially Amitayus, Buddha of Infinite Life, holding the Life Vase in his lap, and Red Tara, offering the Life Vase.
ARI, AN ENLIGHTENED CHILD (OUR POSTER BOY)
So, late in my life it became clear to some foremost people in the field of pre- and perinatal psychology that the Calm Birth method was a well-developed model of how to make better babies. I became a respected baby doctor with very little of the smell of babies on me. Without asking to be called “doctor”, people just called me doctor because I look and act like a doctor and I’ve worked with nurses in the OB departments of various hospitals. I’ve been getting closer and closer to birth the older I get, and amid all the risks and lawsuits of childbirth medicine in the hospitals, I’ve gotten to be really close with some of the outstanding nurses, doulas, midwives, and childbirth educators in the field, ones that smell of babies, many of them Calm Birth teachers and associates. We work together to raise the standard of maternal-infant health in childbirth, and we hope to land the children the planet needs to protect the human spirit and potential.
Among my extended family here in Oregon are Sam and Denise, now in their early 30s, Sam being the eldest son of Dan, one of my closest friends. Dan owns and developed the property that Sam and Denise have further developed into Sweetwater farm, about 10 miles north of Grants Pass. I lived on that property with a computer for three years, writing the Calm Birth and Calm Healing books there. The last year I lived there Sam was starting to come back to the property. After years of wandering he was feeling that he wanted to develop the land as a farm. There was a deep water table under a big central natural field.
He asked me to teach him meditation. I taught him vase breathing. He showed good understanding. He’s had a daily practice with that ever since. Sam went off to a global agriculture conference in Nicaragua, and there he met a young woman, Denise, who he knew from high school in Grants Pass. He had always liked her but hadn’t seen her in years.
They traveled independently all the way to Nicaragua, where they recognized each other immediately. Denise had been away getting degrees at the University of Oregon. By the end of the conference they knew that they were in love with each other and totally supported each other's global development vision.
Sam came back to the farm and told me about him and Denise and he wrote long love letters to her on my computer. Denise had gone to Nicaragua with another guy and was staying there longer than Sam. Sam had to leave the conference and return to GP. When he was writing to her, with his global awareness and great energy, I could feel the force between them already calling in children.
I cautioned Sam and taught him basic tantra for controlling the release of his sperm. But there was a child really waiting for them to get together. Sam went back to Nicaragua, where he and Dan had a property, and there, very lovingly, Sam and Denise went all the way in love. Sam taught Denise vase breathing, and she established a daily practice with him. And as she did vase breathing and made love with Sam, not intending to get pregnant, she quickly got pregnant. It was like she breathed Ari into her life vase.
As soon as Denise knew she was pregnant I sent her the written text for Womb Breathing, the vase breathing practice for pregnant women. (She had no cd player where they were staying on Sam and Dan's land in Nicaragua). So Ari was conceived by people who were practicing energy breathing meditation. Ari’s mother was doing Womb Breathing, complete breathing, in the formative early months of the pregnancy, extending her range of function and potential for childbirth. Fortunate Ari, a guy who it seems knew where and how to be reborn.
Denise gave birth naturally with Womb Breathing on Sweetwater Farm where Sam had been born and raised, and so they started a new generation within their global/spiritual vision. Ari turned out to be a quiet and contemplative boy, and people quiet down to talk to him. He is like Sam very blond and blue-eyed, and Iona claims that Ari is beautiful enough to be the poster image of the enlightened child.
When he was 24 months old, out of the blue, he said to Denise, “You can meditate now.” Denise was struck. How was a child who was supposed to be just learning how to talk speak such a whole sentence communicating knowledge of meditation? We were all impressed. Sam and Denise didn’t speak much about meditation.
One day Iona and I went over to visit Ari, Denise, and Sam, who were then living in the house I was in when I wrote the two books. I brought a photograph I wanted Ari to see. It’s a photo of a three year old Tibetan baby Buddha, sitting in meditation posture with his 7 year old monk attendant sitting in meditation beside him. They really looked to me like they both knew how to meditate well. I asked Ari to look at the photograph closely. I said that the little boy was a baby Buddha. I asked Ari to look and tell me if he could see that the little boy knew how to meditate. Ari looked carefully and we all leaned toward him to hear what he might say. In the quietest clear voice I’ve ever heard he said, “Yes.”
This piece was written today Saturday January 16th, 2010, the day Ari got to see his sister’s birth – Ivory Sage, with the Calm Birth cd playing night and day. Ari got to know meditation very early in life and then he experienced birth up close by the age of three. With his sister, also born by the Calm Birth method, and more than 20,000 other children born by this method, we’re trying to build a new and better generation one sacred baby at a time.
GENTLE DEER IN THE FIELDS OF DEATH
In the afternoon, in the shade of the big trees around my house, I was sitting near the buddha statue in my garden, also facing east. I sat, breathing easily and deeply, breathing oxygen and energy. And there was a lot of oxygen. The vegetation was in full flourish and green as can be. I was just sitting in open awareness when I noticed a big doe coming toward me. She was about 100 feet away and hadn’t seen me yet. She was slowly eating along, enjoying the abundance of soft vegetation, innocently heading to my right. I watched her hesitate at a deer path leading uphill. Instead she turned her head around quickly and looked directly into my eyes.
The unmoving eye contact lasted at least two minutes. It was great incentive to focus in living presence. Then she turned her body and started eating in another direction, headed to a small storage unit near me. I had the clear sense that she had become interested in me and would slowly appear at the other side of the storage unit, about 50 feet from me. My eyes focused on the place where she would appear if she was heading closer to me.
She emerged right where I was looking, and briefly looked at me again, undisturbed in her constant eating, seemingly headed toward me very slowly, about 10 minutes away if nothing interfered. Another doe appeared, headed in the same direction. It was clear they were traveling companions. They feasted slowly but intensely, until they were about 10 feet apart and 20 feet from me, both heading toward me. I was still as the buddha statue sitting next to me.
My doe took glances at me once in a while but the other doe didn’t seem to notice me. When mine was about 12 feet from me, still headed right at me, the other deer slowly veered away, to the other side of the buddha statue. When my doe was about 5 feet in front of me, eating and eating and eating, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was calm and unmoving but as excited as I’ve ever been!
She came right up to me without looking at me and slowly went by me on my left side, so close that I could have petted her by only extending my left hand a little, but I didn’t move. [As Iona said of this story, “After all it was a first date.”] I relaxed and breathed effortlessly, breathing the richness as she slowly went by and then slowly kept on going. I turned the chair around and watched.
I sat still until the sun started to set in the West. As ever I wondered how long we had to live, given how dangerous life is, and the answer is that there’s only the present moment, in all the living dimensions of the human body, in this timeless absolute world.
THE DOCTOR AND THE GUNS
When I was six I was given a pair of six-shooter guns, in holsters on a belt put around my waist. My folks let me go outside and play, with a gun in each hand, pulling the triggers. The metal snapped and exploded little gunpowder caps, sending out imaginary bullets I shot wildly into the air.
Later that year we moved to a little house in southern Brooklyn, a house that had an attic. When I was seven I looked around up there and saw an old-time rifle, maybe a Civil War musket, or even older. There were also a few little metal balls the rifle could fire. It was left by a former owner of the house. The rifle was up by the little window in the attic where it could shoot out, if it had to defend the house.
When I was 10 World War II ended and two of my uncles came back, one from the war in Europe and one from the war in Asia. They both brought us souvenirs of the war. One was a loaded bullet so large it was stunning. It looked like it was for a big machine gun, the kind they fired on ships at attacking planes. Placed next to the very old rifle you could see a dramatic advance in gun technology, and also in the attic was a collection of the 4 page weekly magazine published by the United Nations, with dramatic photos of the effects of war technology on human beings.
During college I once fired my roommate’s gun, with his keen encouragement. It was a powerful 357 magnum pistol. I was a pacifist but Russell brought gun culture into my life. When I fired the weapon into the mountainside up in the Berkeley hills, my hand was not all the way out of the window so that the explosion (rookie mistake) happened more in the car than was good for the ears. The explosion was deafening, and though I was a strong 21 year old the force of the explosion rocked my body to the hilt. So much for all those cops and robbers and Western movies where the guys shoot bing bang bing, like me with my six-shooters when I was six.
Make no mistake about it, today’s guns are very powerful and accurate weapons.
After college I served a short tour of duty in the army. I fired a 1958 US Army rifle many times, and I threw hand grenades, making noise in New Jersey at a time of relative peace in the world. Being the noncommissioned officer leading my platoon, I led us into the simulated battle we fought the last week of basic training. We fired blanks that had the blast and shock of gunfire as sergeants screamed at us to kill and kill.
That wasn’t too bad, but the guns, the biggest ones, really got to me when they sent me to my long-term assignment, a guided missile base in New Britton, Connecticut. Imagine something shaped like the big bullet in my attic in Brooklyn but a million times larger and billions of times more powerful, plus billions of times more toxic, plus it had a sophisticated brain and can fire itself up through the skies and kill any city in the world.
I lasted four days, got a medical escort off the base, and then managed to get an honorable discharge from the army. Having feared atomic bombs since I was a kid, being stationed on a base with 6 of them proved to me that history was a nightmare that I could only become more aware of. And though the nuclear arsenals have gotten bigger and badder since then, by some great grace of life I’m still alive and well, and I’ve been able to present new medicine for anxiety, stress, and evolution.
WOODY AND ME
Woody Allen, the Dalai Lama, and I were all born in 1935. I have a shrine in my bedroom that might look to you like I’m related to the Dalai Lama, and I am, but I grew up in Brooklyn near where Woody grew up, at exactly the same time, and there’s something about Woody that makes me think he’s the steady comedian I sometimes thought I might like to be.
After more than 20 years of working with several Tibetan teachers, in 1994, just before I left New York City to move to Oregon, I spent months developing a comic routine with the idea in mind of developing a comic profession. I called my act Comic State, and I changed my name in order to be funny. I renamed myself Robert Human.
Since I’m writing this autobio for me and whoever else I may amuse, I’m now going to speak a line or two from my act: “I was born on a farm in Brooklyn. My brothers taught me how to have sex with sheep and goats…. I
grew up in Los Angeles. I was a gang leader. We were the High Hands. I was the head Hand…” But friends discouraged me from even trying.
I did get a reputation for being outrageous and getting away with it in temples of Buddhist meditation.
That was all spontaneous. Woody’s movies are well-written creative comedies. And if I could do my life over again I wish I could have also written some successful comic film scripts and TV comedy, to make millions of people feel happy and free. Living in the targets of the Lord.
SOMEWHERE IN THE GREAT FIELD OF AMERICAN GRAFFITI
I drove across America from New York to Los Angeles on my way to college at UC Berkeley, and I’ve driven from New York to Colorado and back a few times, and have driven on the highways of the West for many years. One time many years ago I was on a long trip on a big highway and had to pee. I pulled into a truck stop to use the men’s room. As I entered a stall and started to open my fly, I was as usual reading everything written on the walls, looking for the words of a prophet. I saw one of the best toilet poems I’ve ever seen, over crude drawings of tits and cock. It said:
Born on a mountain,
bred in a cave,
trucking and fucking is all that I crave.
I finished peeing, paused for the moment, took a pen out of my pocket, found an available space on the wall, and wrote:
Backed by the Buddha,
I see with your eyes
and I look into your eyes.
Let’em think about that while driving the truck.
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE GREAT PORTAL?
In the fall of 2011 I had a girlfriend whose best friends were Rose and Paul. We had dinner together several times and then Paul invited us to spend a few days at his California house, high above an indescribable blue silver Pacific Ocean at the juncture of a big blue green California river. The house was aligned so that when you sat in the hot tub (a great place to sit) you could face East at dawn sitting directly into the rising sun, and we did.
All I knew about Paul was that he had been a career air force officer who at one time was a part of the high command. Now he was a pleasant man being sweet to me. After a quiet evening listening to the music of the ocean and fireplace, after a good sleep and then the unforgettable dawn in the tub, after breakfast we drove about 20 miles to take a long walk in the Redwood National Forest, and throughout the day, with my encouragement, Paul told me a lot about his life.
I learned that he had come from a German-American family who had been undertakers for several generations. Death was the family business. When Jack was 17 he busted away from that and joined the air force. The Viet Nam war was getting hotter and he enlisted to be a fighter pilot. The amazing truth is that he flew jet fighter aircraft through the skies of the Viet Nam war for 3 years and lived to tell the story, never really getting enough rest, sometimes overtired and a little juiced, shooting down many other aircraft and bombing countess targets, surviving day after murderous day. He flew attack missions in daylight and at night and he survived. His family karma with death had leaped a dimension.
Paul was commissioned Colonel and then was groomed for a special new post: chief military officer in charge of all United States military weapons sales, including sophisticated aircraft of various kinds, and more and more advanced weaponry. For more than a decade, with major CIA involvement, Paul learned every bolt and circuit of every American death weapon. He said, “We make the best and everyone wants it.” He needed a significant CIA presence in his house in Europe for protection and intelligence.
Everyone wanted it but who can you sell to and not cause yourself danger or endanger your allies? A vastly profitable lethal industry par excellence. There was great tension around the job and Paul had extensive CIA training in how to avoid assassination. He survived more than a decade in that position. Married and raised a family in the process, and then retired. He was attracted to the great parks of the West Coast and attended various self-realization seminars at Esalen.
Shortly after our weekend together Jack went with Rose and others on a special trip to Peru, to be at Machu Picchu at 11am on November 11th of 2011, a moment that some mystical people around the world called the Moment of the Portal, seeing it as a crucial time for the evolution of the human species.
In Peru they experienced local fermented beverages, shaman and power drugs, and other things Paul was unfamiliar with, and he became altered before the Machu Picchu excursion. Suddenly, for a period of several minutes, with his wife and others present he was channeling a language that he and others thought was ancient. He told me that it was like something grasped the voice box in his throat and he began speaking in a tone and language he had never heard. His voice was strong and confident believing that he was speaking an ancient language, maybe Inca. It happened abruptly, lasted about 3 minutes, and was over before someone thought to record it. One thing that he understood throughout was that he was in a great portal, he said. Afterwards his emotions then became extreme, tears to laughter. Then it was over and he was changed. The “speaking in tongues” didn’t happen again but he was altered going to Machu Picchu.
With good planning and their guide’s help they reached the ancient spiritual site high in the sky in time to be settled in with their guide awaiting the 11/11/11/11th moment. They had the most special room among the buildings all to themselves. It was open to the sky on one side. The sky had darkened and lightning storms boomed throughout the region. Just before 11 o’clock two Peruvian shaman women appeared, and began ritual. Having been altered to begin with, now Paul’s karma was unimaginable. He’d gone through the Portal into another kind of space. (Rose confirmed all the above.)
Speaking in tongues is a very interesting subject. Basically there are two kinds. One is associated with some Christian sects. Language-like sounds are made that do not have language connotation. It’s a mumbo-jumbo that clears away rational thought and is done as a practice in church. The other kind of altered speaking is when a person spontaneously channels a language unknown to them, ancient or present. It’s a very interesting paranormal experience channeled from the collective unconscious. It was the paranormal aliveness that haunted Paul afterwards.
He slowly relaxed again, and came back a more gentle man, feeling that he might still be in the Portal, still haunted by the ancient language, the sound of it inside him. I think he finished his death business karma for good. He seems like a kind man, a family man interested in community service.
RHAPSODY IN BLACK
My mother though good-looking was somewhat frail. She suffered from a bad back and from hemorrhaging when she had her period. Sometimes her blood loss and weakening required that help be brought in, and from my early youth Aunt Millie was a big part of my life. To this day she was one of the best friends I’ve ever had. She was a heavy-set black woman in her late 40’s or in her 50s. She took care of my mother and my sister and me and was a trusted part of our household. Sometimes I’d go on an errand with her and she’d hold my little white hand nicely and admire my platinum blond curls.
When I was six I got into the only fist-fight I’ve ever had, with my friend Allen, same size as me, and right in front of my house. I have no recall of what Al did to make me go off like that. He may have been pushing me trying to test me and I spontaneously boxed him silly. I landed many punches in an accurate barrage until I heard Millie’s raised voice say, “Stop that now! Bobby you get over here!” She came out of the house and ended that emotional fight. Tears were flowing from my eyes as I pounded Al. I was humiliated that I got caught up in it. Millie held me and quieted me down.
When I was 12 I woke up and wonderfully there was a pretty black girl, about my age, just waking up in my guest bed. Then Millie came in and introduced me to her daughter, Gail. I loved her. We had breakfast together and then I never saw her again.
Maybe 1% of the population of my neighborhood in Brooklyn was “black”. In James Madison High School the 4 years I was there I only remember two such people. One was Margie Tucker who ran for election on my team when I ran for Vice President of the school. She was light-skinned and exceptionally beautiful. She was also very smart and very nice. She had the best qualities but I was too shy with her to ask her out.
My father was a shoe salesman until I was about 12, and then my uncle and grandfather took Jack into their business with them – used office equipment - in an old loft building in what is now SoHo. When I was 16 my father took over the business and sometimes needed my help after high school and on Saturdays, working upstairs in the 3 story building, doing things with dirty second-hand office equipment. I worked with a good natured black guy my dad employed: Bill Terry. He was a natural Adonis, in his forties and fit. He was a balanced and easy-going worker, and he loved to work with me. He kidded me a lot. “My god Bobby look how big your muscles are getting! I just can‘t keep up with you.”
When I was a young poet about 24 years old I used to add to my income from poetry readings by working down on the docks, unloading fruit and freight of various kinds. Once I spent a pleasant day working with a black guy name of Jim, unloading a huge truckload of tires for jet air craft. Very large new rubber tires (smell them), but a guy could pull a tire free, set it upright on the truck floor, and roll it with care to another trucking dock. Think of the beauty of it, the peacefulness, the rich smell of new rubber, and me and Jim smiling crossing paths with each other throughout, going deeper and deeper into the truck, sometimes helping each other.
Another time down on the docks I was working with 4 big black guys unloading a truck of wooden crates of oranges. It was a night shift, quiet, but peaceful – no radios, no singing, but there was some harmony. Deep in the truck we decided to take a break, and the guys started bantering about fighting. Two different kinds of fights were described. In a lull, I said, “Shit, don’t you guys know anything about fighting? It’s the crazier man who wins, not the stronger one? I got a: “that’s right” from 2 of the guys.
Substantial friendship: Derwood Collins, poet. Wood and I were friends in Manhattan, 1965-66. He was good-looking and spoke well and was easy to like. I used to joke with him that when the revolution came he could fire out the window and I’d hide under the bed. But that never happened.
My life time has lived through the triumphs and tragedies of the civil rights movement that brought to light the vicious cruelty of some of the worst forces in America and brought us through to where, in my seventies, we’ve had a half-black President and a royal black First Lady, and almost every ad appearing throughout the media is of multiracial couples and families.
I’ve lived through the evolving of democracy in America, and I’ve noticed something. Think of the great basketball player Michael Jordan. He made an evolutionary leap in the body language of the game. As we watched Michael and then others like him, with the great sports photography we have, we’ve watched the human body extend its aerial ability. Moreover, every white player, man or woman, felt the same evolution come into the movements of their game. I know that’s true.
So in the nuclear age some things have slowly gotten better, fairer, but then again, living in the age of stockpiled superkill the only thing fair about this theater of life is the light of our body mass.
CREATIVE FORCE
I remember vividly when I met Laura Dean at a party in Manhattan in 1966. She was 20 years old and had intent and glow in her. She was a dancer. She was speaking with my date, also a dancer, and I joined the conversation. Laura spoke very well. I made a comment on what she was saying, something like: “Being itself, in space.” Laura responded by repeating the words. After that we became close and lived together a while. I was able to see her start to come into her own. All the time we were together she was working on her fourth solo dance, then she moved to San Francisco for 2 years and in her studio work broke into the circular and spinning movement forms that she was then to expound into brilliant work for decades, receiving every highest award and honor in the field of dance, creating her own music for her remarkable work. www.lauradean.com.
When Laura lived with me my apartment looked like an image theater. I thought I was a poet who liked to work with new kinds of visual art but some people thought that my image art was better than my writing. When I met Laura I had a work in the Museum of Modern Art. I was directing a mid-town art gallery and writing for the arts magazines. There was a sense of openness and interconnectedness in the arts. Laura and I attended most dance performances at the Judson Theater, and we were friends with various poets and artists. Laura started to write, and it was good from the very first paragraph she wrote. Her very first few works of writing were published.
She brought Kenneth King and Meredith Monk over to visit, two exception young creative forces in dance. Meredith was already doing successful dance theater incorporating various visual media to extend the imagery created by her dancers. Laura was evolving her own field of dance, more classically dance than Meredith’s work. For Laura the integration of new kinds of music and new kinds of movement would be distinctive. She was finding her own way after years of training with various teachers.
And she did. From 1973-5 she worked closely with Steve Reich who composed the music for several dances for Laura’s company. That was an important period in her creative emergence, but after that for the rest of her career she created the music for her dances. Do visit her website and watch the videos of many of her best productions, most of them on major stages, like Lincoln Center. When you see how good the work is, read what the critics say about her. Note that the acclaims quoted are mostly from the NY Times.
I saw the Joffrey Ballet perform a major work of Laura’s at Lincoln Center about 1990 – Creative Force. The next day I called her to tell her that I thought that her work was among the break-throughs in the arts of our time. Now I add: Thank you Laura. I’m glad I loved you and believed in you.
Note: The above had been written into this book a few months ago. I’ve had no contact with Laura since 1990. Then yesterday, April 14th, 2014, out of the blue I received an email from her. Unknown to me she said she had been following my work for many years and had bought my books and given them as presents to others. She said she was proud of me and wanted to send me a special gift. It’s a rare Tibetan Buddhist statue, very old. It was with her when I visited her in 1980. I remembered it vividly. It’s a flying Vajrayogini or dancing dakini. A dakini is a form of paranormal wisdom-being and the images look like liberated woman. To me it’s another icon for the childbirth meditation program, and it goes well with Red Tara, the spiritual icon of the Calm Birth teacher.
All blessings to you dear Laura. Thank you forever for the treasure.
SKYLARK IN FLIGHT
Let us not forget Carol Skylark.
She knocked on the door of my cabin on Monhegan Island in 1996. She was 20 years old. My friend Leonard had told me that she was a genius and that she was coming to Mongegan Island, so I was expecting her. I regularly met with artists of all ages when I was director of the Spectrum gallery (’66-70). She was the youngest artist I’d ever heard called a genius.
And a beautiful and soft young woman she was, with a spinal problem that didn’t seem to limit her. When we were both back in Manhattan I went over to visit her to finally see her artwork. There were many paintings for a young person and there were many drawings.
My face was blank as I took a good look at painting after painting and saw nothing exceptional. I was wondering what Leonard had seen. I asked her to show me absolutely everything she had. I was glum quiet and Carol must have been feeling bad. Finally she showed me another group of drawings and I struck gold. Absolutely a work of genius and unlike all the other drawings and all the paintings I looked at. It was a pencil drawing on a piece of heavy paper about 18 by 24 inches, a vertical drawing of herself as a figure turning in herself, turning and opening in her spine. Carol was so relieved at my excitement that she immediately gave me the drawing, which I still have and cherish.
After that we were variously close friends and lovers for many years. She was very gifted but didn’t become well-known in the New York art world. She moved to Colorado and established a new life there. She married Joe the physicist, settled in Fort Collins, gave birth to her son, and developed a remarkable career in psychic portraiture, and as a seer, and had her own TV program and her own poetry and jazz band for years. She had become a very beautiful liberated woman.
Please visit:
Carol Skylark (lighttorchproductions) on Myspace
I think you can see that she’s a unique multi-gifted person. Precious human being.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer about 1990 and we became close again. I committed to being with her as much as possible, and went through various courses of treatment, and surgery, and recovery with her over a several year period. I was closer with her than her sisters and mother in this period and they accepted me as family.
In about 1991 Carol was in New York because her mother was dying. Carol was staying with her mother, who was in her wheelchair in the last stage of a skin shrinking disease and nervous disorder. She asked Carol to wheel her around the apartment, which gave her some release. When she could, Carol called me and we hung out.
Then her mother shouted, “Wheel me faster, faster!” Carol and the nurse did what they could. And then Mom died. Boom. Just like that. She had confided a last wish to Carol. She said, “Cremate me and scatter my ash on the Roseland Ballroom dance floor.”
Within a couple of days she was cremated, and Carol and I together with Carol’s two sisters and their husbands went to the big Roseland Ballroom in central Manhattan to fulfill Mom’s last wish. What seemed natural was that after one drink Carol and I went out together on the dance floor, me with a plastic pouch of the cremation ash in my right pocket, and on that vast hardwood dance floor, with many other couples dancing and with Carol’s family watching we did an inconspicuopus ceremonial dance. As invisibly as possible I lightly scattered most of the ash on the great ballroom floor. After the funeral dance I had some ash still in my pocket and some on my pants, a sign that I was part of the family.
What a great last wish and it was a joy to help Carol fulfill it.
In 1994 cancer reemerged in Carol. She was in Ft. Collins and I was in New York as she went through the hardest kind of cancer treatment, chemotherapy and radiation. She connected with Chagdud Tulku through me. She made a connection with him and designed a wonderful cover for Rinpoche’s new book while she was suffering through the therapy. We decided that I would fly out to Ft. Collins and drive her to California to be with Chagdud Tulku in his temple in Junction City.
And so we drove, me at the wheel of her big station wagon and Carol mostly lying in the back, looking very thin and drawn, wearing a silk scarf over her bald head. It was a long, quiet ride through Wyoming and Nevada. Carol liked it when I did Buddhist practices aloud.
In the temple Carol looked like she might be dying, but we knew it was the treatment she was enduring. We received empowerments and teachings for a couple of days. Rinpoche radiated his medicine into her.
We left and Carol developed an intense desire for us to camp out on Mt. Shasta for one night before going back to Colorado. That was an immediate challenge in that it was to be below freezing on the lower mountain that night, I found out, and we had no warm clothes and only a funky pup tent. Carol’s daring spirit implored me to fulfill her wish. We settled for a compromise. I’d drive to Mt. Shasta and we could drive up to a big redwood area on the lower mountain, we could spend an hour or so and then go down, have a nice dinner, and go to a motel for a good sleep overnight.
We then drove to a nice area on the lower mountain and walked among the redwoods. We moved slowly and openly through the immense trees. Carol found the spot she was looking for and sat down. I sat in a similar place, on the soft redwood pine needles, about 30 feet away from where she was sitting. Carol says that she wants me to tell what happened to her then.
She sat up in meditation posture, aligned herself, faced into an opening through the trees into the sky over the great mountain, and went into union with the spiritual body of Chagdud Tulku. In the yab-yum spiritual embrace of male and female Buddha bodies she pulsated into absolute life. It was embodied white light of the attainment of reaching all life. She had finally reached attainment – is what I believe she said.
In a while Carol again began to insist – “We have time to get better camping gear and warmer clothes and camp here!!” It was starting to get cold and cloudy and windy. But after what had happened for her she knew it wasn’t necessary to spend the night. We went down into the town, had dinner, and checked into a motel.
That night there was a great storm. It made us sit up alert to the energy. There were prolonged periods of lighting and thunder, rain and wind and heavy hail. Unforgettable. So much lightning. The night was loudly booming and roaring and pouring down white ice balls of hail that rocked the motel roof.
The next day after breakfast both Carol and I wanted to drive up to the place with great trees where she wanted to camp the night before. I will never forget what we saw. There were large balls of hail on the road which made driving uphill dangerous, but it was a good car with good tires and I carefully made it uphill to the area we wanted to get to. As we got there we both were startled. The lightning storm had exploded two great redwood trees where Carol wanted to set a tent. There were massive burned trunks and exploded pieces of redwood everywhere, the great debris still smoking and covered with a coat of balls of ice. The feel of electric power was intense. The death scene of the two old redwoods was unforgettable. And it happened so fast.
I had some Tibetan incense to make an offering for Carol. We carefully drove up maybe 100 feet further on the icy road and stopped. I got out and Carol rested inside. On the side of the great mountain we made an incense offering. I chanted a long melodic prayer that Carol recover completely again, and that she never lose her genius.
I drove her back to Ft. Collins. I flew back to New York, and since then we’ve been in touch by email, and we’ve spoken a few times. She did recover in 1994 and 1995 and was then cancer free for many years. And since then cancer came back. Her energy is remarkable. Her spirit is very good. She goes to psychic fairs and offers her services as a psychic portrait artist, earning a living, and always working on big painting projects. Some take a year or 2 to complete and are never finished. She’s painted magnificent yab yum paintings, male and female bodies in the union of spiritual embrace.
More recently she’s been painting studies of herself as a flying winged woman. Last year she said she was probably at cancer stage 4. She’s 67 now and doing very well considering that she has ongoing pain from cancer and from long-time spinal problems.
A few months ago she wrote that she had just been to 2 psychic fairs in California. I’ll say this: if you could organize an exhibition of the 50 best psychic portraits Carol’s done over 4 decades, portraits of others in which her genius comes alive, it would most likely be seen as a vital achievement in the art of our times.
Please see her beautiful videos, her paintings, her psychic portrait art:
Carol Skylark (lighttorchproductions) on Myspace
MY FRIEND DOCTOR DOSSEY
Throughout my many years of work with Tibetan teachers I studied the quickly evolving field of mind-body medicine. In my teaching work I had to
present the shifts in the medical paradigm in terms of a new medical model. The work of two eminent doctors was perfect for me to build on, Herbert Benson, MD, of the Harvard Medical School, and Larry Dossey, MD,
a former chief of internal medicine and then the brilliant author of books that see the changes in the field of medicine as an opportunity for new kinds of medical practice and care.
When North Atlantic Books/ Random House was about to publish my first book on the new medical model, Calm Healing (with Ruth Miller) the publisher asked Larry Dossey for an endorsement. Larry received the prepublication document and then responded with:
“The true calculus of healing makes conventional approaches look like five-fingered arithmetic. Calm Healing is a marvelous description of the healing powers that are freely available – here, now, everywhere.”
A few years ago Larry and I became friends on Facebook. Then in 2013 when I was about to publish Empowered Care, my most complete and advanced work on the medical uses of meditation, I turned to Larry and asked if he’d like to see a prepublication copy. He said yes and we sent him the document. He responded with:
Dear Robert,
Thanks for sending Empowered Care. Beautifully done! Please feel free to use the following comment in any way that might be of help:
"No approach to medicine and healing can be adequate if it does not include attention to the role of mind, consciousness, and spirit. Extensive research confirms this, and there is no going back to the strictly materialistic views of the past. Empowered Care is a valuable look at the how these elements are being integrated into modern medicine. EMPOWERED CARE is the medicine of the future. Let Newman and Miller be your guide."
~ Larry Dossey, MD
I send best personal wishes for a successful book,
Yours,
~ Larry
I responded by sending him a copy of Childbirth Meditation as a Christmas gift, not asking for an endorsement. He responded:
I love Childbirth Meditation. It's a superb guide not just for mothers-to-be, but also for midwives and OB-GYNS. Fathers-to-be should read it as well. The lessons learned in this book will extend into the lives of new mothers long after delivery.
Way to go! The world is better for your work.
Happy Holidays,
~ Larry
Recently (4/14) Peggy O’Mara of Mothering Magazine published a beautiful web page on Calm Birth, enriched with striking photos of pregnant women practicing meditation to raise the level of childbirth. Peggy quoted from my book Childbirth Meditation about the importance of Larry Dossey’s work. Larry responded with:
Dear Robert,
Such a beautiful, glowing website!
I'm honored to be a part of it.…
I wrote to Peggy to thank her and she said: “Meditation is the future of childbirth preparation.” And so it is that late in life I’ve perfected my work and earned such friends. The work has been done in the universal field.
MY FRIEND THE WIZZARD OF WIT
Iona’s been one of my best friends going on 10 years now. Something called a Wisdom Center was incorporated in Grants Pass about 2005 and Iona and I showed up at its first meeting. I was going because my associate Ruth Miller was founding the Wisdom Center. She had founded more than one. Iona came because, unlike me, she had lived in Grants Pass many years, so she came to see what the “Wisdom Center” was.
It was winter and she was bundled up in disguise. She had a wool cap pulled down to her eyes, with little-old-lady eyeglasses on her nose, and her coat was hunched up to her mouth. When it was her turn to say something about who she was she spoke of interests in Jung and PSI and hypnosis. I of course spoke of Tibetan masters and my work in mind-body medicine. We met.
We became the best of friends. Over the years Iona and I have spent much time together because we have easy great talks about, say, quantum physics and primordial awareness, zero point power and the absolute, Russia’s use of intense PSI training for espionage, the real cabal of power in the world, the importance of humor, the primordial archetypes, etc. She’s is a graced babe, savvy and hip. Because of her love of knowledge in various disciplines, including Kabballah, by the time I met her she had personally befriended scientists and teachers in various domains and was clearly respected by them.
Iona reads quickly and writes quickly a lot, and you’ve got to know something more. She has the best sense of humor I ever met besides my own. She’s got great comic wit. She has many websites (start with http://ionamiller.weebly.com ). She presents herself as Meta Hari, and the Spy Whisperer, and over the years has staged and produced a hundred outstanding images of herself, from the comic to the spiritually noble to the very sly. That’s my buddy Iona.
She was keenly interested in my work with Tibetan teachers. She had been a Sant Mat disciple many years ago and since then has respected the advances of Buddhist meditation in the medical and cognitive sciences. Eventually she received a major Dudjom Tersar empowerment, as a blessing. Because of that she could speak with me about many things in the sacred practices without becoming a Buddhist as such and without establishing a meditation practice. But when we spoke about the quantum void the world arises from and the evolutionary distinction between mind and awareness we were often speaking about Dzogchen practice, resting in unlimited primordial awareness, from which mind and the world arise.
She came to New York City with me for a June, 2005 Calm Birth teacher training. We had talked about New York a lot, me having been a native for so long and she having come from Los Angeles and then Oregon. But for all the famous museums and people and whatever was happening at once in the Great City that weekend, Iona choose stay for all sessions of the 3 day training. I encouraged her to venture out, several times, but Io said that the meditation training was very good, all of it, and she wanted to stay. The next year she became the central person on the Medigrace Board of Directors. She’s been the main encourager and supporter for this book.
When I came to Oregon in 1995 I silenced my identity as a successful artist. It was too much to explain. And I was intent on teaching meditation in the medical establishment. I didn’t call myself anything but I liked it when people called me doctor. I put the artist in the closet. But 10 years after I came to Oregon I met Iona and she got excited about what I told her and showed her of my artwork, and the New York of that era. She brought me out and now she’s got me all the way out of the closet. She designed a website for my artwork that accompanies this book.
Iona? Don’t miss her websites and be sure to see her videos:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ionamiller
One last story about Io. She was once being interviewed on a national radio program and I decided to dial in and listen to the interview on my telephone. So I did. Iona was talking about technology and the paranormal.
Then there was a momentary lull and the interviewer said to Iona – “I see we have someone calling in to join us, and it’s someone from your own area code. Hello there.” I froze. I was NOT calling to be on the program. I just called to listen. I tried to hide. “Hello there, are you with us?” the interviewer said, encouragingly. I was trapped. After a few moments of daring silence on the part of Iona and the interviewer, I had to explain myself and get out as fast as possible. I said softly, “Ah, I’m a friend of Iona’s, Robert Newman, and I was just calling in to LISTEN. I really didn’t want to be on the show.” But then Iona didn’t want me to go. She liked having me there. I still strongly wanted to be off the air. Io asked me something. I answered and as quickly as possible turned the answer into a statement about the importance of Iona’ work in Quantum Holography and how the interviewer should ask her about that. I quickly added that I had to go and I hung up. Ask Iona about that.
ONCE, AND FOR ALL
January 24, 2018: Having lived by some miracle into my 83rd year on Earth, more than ever the space of the infinite universe, inconceivable unborn life, is what and who I am. The most marvelous part of the last few years has been the deep development of my relation to Anna Humphreys, my protege, now the Director of Calm Birth. She is more of a daughter and closest family than I've ever had. She has remarkably evolved the Calm Birth program in the past three years. She carries my work forward. We've become closer and closer since she moved to Seattle 2 years ago. In the last year we've been able to have a deep study of Buddhist meditation, so she has a sound knowledge of Buddhist meditation instruction and practice. I've managed to live long enough to deepen my study and teaching of meditation and connect Anna to the great Nyingma lineage of Tibetan dharma. May it ever bless her in her devoted efforts to benefit all life through our international childbirth program. May the advanced work in prenatal meditation ever be a blessing to the lineage it came from.
My dearest friend Sandra Bardsley, the great nurse midwife who helped me found Calm Birth, also deeply loves Anna.[To see Anna go to calmbirth.org]
INTO THE NEW
And on and on we go. We continuously head through the gate with the planet even more dangerous than when I grew up in a nuclear bomb target. In a way I’m much the same. I think I’m trillions of cells and living systems and inconceivable dimensions of inherent potential, and more life than I could ever begin to know. Yet I know what the lyricist Leonard Cohen meant when he sang:
Myself I long for love and light
but must it come so cruel, and oh so bright
Now let Leonard know my words as I sing:
The species sees itself alive and growing fast
with so much deadly might in its power
it turns faster into the light of its mass.
Ashland, Oregon, January 24, 2018