Amma, the Hugging Saint of India in New York

Amma, known as the Hugging Saint of India, is in New York this week.  I'm heading off to see her today.  The last time I saw her was 7 or 8 years in New York when two friends and I received hugs from her.  The effects were dramatic for one of my friends we learned later.  Several years previously, my friend was diagnosed with an inoperable brain aneurysm.  A brain scan several months after our visit to Amma showed no sign of the aneurysm.  Coincidence?  I don't know but life is mysterious.

Amm'a North American Tour Summer 2012

Uncomfortable With Certainty

A friend asked me what I saw myself doing in five years. That's the kind of question to which I usually don't have an answer. Planning long term, longer term has never been my forte. Perhaps this has something to do with the many sudden moves I experienced as child. My response to the question was that I'll probably continue to follow my nose.

Here are words from Parabola magazine's emailed newsletter of June 24 that serve to reassure me about my MO:

Another way of putting it would be (without knowing Chinese) to
propose this new translation of the first line of the Tao Te Ching:
A way that is entirely laid out, no, it is not the way. I told you
that I have encountered in my life a true teaching. One of the signs
of its truth, for me, is that it never proposes an entirely
prescribed path. No, at every step the entire dilemma is revisited.
For me, nothing is resolved once and for all. And what I have always
loved in you is your refusal of a prearranged path, and that is
important to me because alone one can't sustain such a position. We
must be a number of people to help each other, to awaken one
another.

Rene Daumal from a letter to Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, November
1941 from PARABOLA, Fall 2009: The Path.

Indra's Net

I had an interesting experience recently while leading an ongoing meditation class at Onsen For All in the Princeton, NJ area. After some time of sitting in the quiet, my children came to mind and I was drawn to noticing the connections between them and around them. The around them connections, those to their parents, friends, other family members, teachers, fellow students – the list goes on, grew and grew. More and more layers of connectedness appeared until there appeared a dense multi-dimensional living web of grey filaments. At each junction there was a nodule that become quietly jewel-like. Ah! Indra's net.

Indra's net is a Buddhist metaphor for the inter-connectedness of the universe. It is a splendid image in which a multi-layered net hangs over the palace of the god, Indra, infinitely stretching out in all directions. At each junction, a multi-faceted jewel sits, reflecting each of the other jewels in the net. It is said that when a change occurs to one facet of one jewel, it is reflected in every other jewel throughout the universe.

In the image held in my mind, several of the nodules or jewels disappeared. There was immediate widespread disturbance as the wounds appeared in the web. After a little time, the web seemed compelled to repair itself. Irrevocably changed, the web continued on in its way, each piece playing its part. A metaphor for life.



Is it voodoo?

Even though I've now put my hands on several thousand people, most of them when I was worked at  Morrisotwn Memorial Hospital's Integrative Medicine program as a hands on healer and have seen "stuff" happen under my hands, I still have moments of doubt about my ability or anyone's ability to effect change in another person.

Perhaps I am not really doing much.  It certainly doesn't look like I'm doing much as I sit or stand very still and am mostly silent as I work with a person.  Maybe when I put my hands on a person I'm simply giving their system a jumpstart, a gentle prod, a quiet wake up call.  It's said by many healers that the body's desire is to be in equilibrium. 

In Jin Shin Jyutsu, the hands are jumper cables, much like a car's starter system, giving one's energetic system just enough of a boost to get itself working more smoothly.  And we can do that for ourselves.

In the Reiki healing system, the energy the healer transmits to the other knows right where to go.  How is that?

It's like magic, right?  Or voodoo?  But if it helps a person to feel better, does it matter if it's voodoo?

The gazing healer

Recently on a trip to California, I had the chance to see Braco, pronounced Braht-zo, a healer from Croatia.  His way of working with people is different to all the healers I've met or worked with or even heard about to this point.   It is certainly different to the way I work with people.   Braco's way of helping people is to simply gaze at them, but not necessarily individually.  Usually, Braco gazes at a crowd of people, hundreds of people.

Braco does not call himself a healer although many healings are attributed to him.

On a recent Sunday morning I parked the rental car near the Holiday Inn on Van Ness Street in San Francisco.  The line for the 10:00am session (just one of nine daily gazing sessions) was already hundreds of people long.  I did some math.  If the cost of a session is $8, how many people can be seated here in this ballroom?  My quick and conservative estimate was 600.  Times  nine sessions is a lot of money.   I wondered how many books, DVDs and gold necklaces are sold daily.  I noticed my inner skeptic was very much alive and active.

I felt irritated by the young, attractive, blonde hostess's buoyant remarks about Braco and the apparent miracles that result spontaneously during and after the 10 minute gazing sessions.  Volunteers helping with seating and other aspects of the organization spoke to the audience about their own experiences of Braco's gaze.  Still my inner skeptic was active.  Indeed, it was hyper-active.

At some point after Braco appeared on the stage, I decided that I could try to hold my skepticism while also remaining open to the possibility that I might also have a healing experience.  After all, I call myself a healer.  Rather than holding the two states simultaneously, I might have been oscillating between the two instead.

As this long haired man with a sweet face and presence stood silently turning his head from side to side as he seemed to take in all of the people standing in front of him, I wondered, "Why him?"  Why isn't the person next to me, or even myself imbued with such apparent extraordinary power?   What about mass hysteria, mass hypnotism?  Finally, I reflected on the idea of all time being present all of the time.

If past, present and future are always with us in the moment, then if I was to be healed, I might already be healed.

Words cycled through my mind, “I will be healed, I am healed, I was healed.” “I was healed, I am healed, I will be healed.”

The realization came, that I am fine as I am.  And for a while afterward I could know that.