Getting Permission to Flow

Here is a passage from my book "The Translucent Revolution."

Maria attended one of our retreats a few years ago. Now in her 50s, she has been practicing meditation, which she had learned from a well-known Indian guru, for more than 30 years. She had a very calm, empty, silent presence. She dressed in plain, very sensible clothes and her gray hair was cut in a short, boyish style. After some days, she told us that her greatest difficulty and disappointment was that she still had strong emotions. She felt herself overwhelmed by grief or anger from time to time, which both she and her husband agreed was a sign of weakness, a lack of depth in her meditation practice.

Everything changed one morning when my wife Chameli spoke to her. "Your feelings are beautiful, they are your gift to your husband and to all of us. They bring color and texture to man's world, which can so often be gray and burdensome. Over the next days, please show us all what you are feeling, not only with your words, but with the way you move, with your laughter and your tears." Maria was more than a little disoriented by this invitation, after so many years of practice and masculine discipline. But the transformation that followed was dramatic and inspiring. At first she experimented, a little clumsily, by expressing quite chaotic and painful feelings that had been locked in her body for decades under the mantle of masculine spirituality. But we all also witnessed her tears of joy and her immense tidal wave of love, which was big enough to drown the entire retreat many times over. On the last night we had a party. Everyone dressed up beautifully. One of the other women, a teacher of sacred Indian dance, helped Maria dress in flowing, colorful clothes. She was transformed.

To read more, purchase my book "The Translucent Revolution" HERE.