Several Perspectives at once

This is a practice that has captured my attention for several months where I work: a large non-profit which adopted a small 20-year-old non-profit I cofounded with a friend who has ALS.   Going about my business trying to help disabled clients directly, one-on-one (a leaf on the tree of an organization with hundreds of employees), I kept thinking about the organization as a whole (a top-down, chain-of-command agency) and how, like any natural entity such as a tree or the human body, to be healthy it needs to allow communication in both directions.  I finally wrote up a couple of pages and gave it to the CEO (talking about the collaborative need for both efferent and afferent nerves in the human body , recounting an experience of sitting at a Zen retreat after which my leg was numb for the next half year, and how this was not a good way for my mind to take care of my body, etc).  The CEO was interested enough to invite me out for lunch last Monday, so we could talk more.  But I don’t yet see that I have nudged this man who is  in charge to do anything differently.  I’m glad I made this communication (which felt like something prompted from the Field Communique in a rather holistic way), but now I feel like a witness, not an actor, in how this organization goes about it’s long-established, rather inertial path).  And I wonder, in our daily lives, does even the urge to change how things happen come down to an opportunity for awareness and for the spontaneous communications that may not have any noticeable affect on the people with whom we communicate.  As an acquaintance of mine, who spent several years dying of ALS, put it: “Kiss it, Bless it, and let if Fly.”  And in the process the harvest may be a loosening up of the experience of being stuck in the accidental place where life’s conditioning has plopped us down.– Michael

About Michael Gray

I first started studying TSK in the mid 1980's and have since attended a number of retreats and workshops at the Nyingma Institute, in both TSK and Buddhist themes. I participated in the life-changing Human Development Training Program in 1991, and upon returning to Albuquerque co-founded an organization, Friends in Time (with a friend who has Lou Gehrig's Disease), which continues to serve people with similiar disabilities. I contributed an essay to "A New Way of Being"--the last one in the book--in which I describe how learning to honor who I have been has broadened and deepened my openness to present experience. I live in New Mexico with my wife and two sons.
This entry was posted in Fall 2011 Class Discussions, uncatagorized and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *