Chapter 17. The Bhagavad Gita and Healing, New Hampshire, May 2013

UPDATE — if you’re looking for Chapter 17, that investigates the topic of observing your humanity from your divinity, please scroll down to where it says Chapter 17. But if you’d like to read a reflection from May 2023, please continue reading.

~

Monday May 16, 2023

Good afternoon Beloved Reader, and welcome new readers!

As a writer, I notice how, at times, I experience DOUBT within my psyche. I’m not sure which arises first: Doubt or my Inner Critic. Either state of mind effects my writing.

When this transpires, I’ve learned to step away from writing and go do something physical, which brings me back into connection with the beauty of our blessed Mother Earth and the surrounding natural world. These days I’ve been enjoying walking a local 5-mile loop that presently shows off spectacular blossoming apple trees, Lilacs, Dogwoods, and plenty of other beauties of nature I cannot name, but can still enjoy—Eckhart Tolle calls this direct experience versus the knowing of names which is a kind of conceptual intelligence—which points towards a whole other post I will write at some point in time.

I was also tickled to see this unlikely scene not far from our home. I asked permission to take a photo and they gladly obliged.

from a distance I thought they were walking a large dog, but I was amused to be introduced to this very cute little pony called Millie who, these two women told me, has her own little cart in which she gives children rides.

But back to Doubt and the Inner Critic. In an upcoming chapter in Part 2 of THE BOOK, I write about how Voice Dialog Therapy saved my life. We had moved back to Australia in January 1998, and by mid-1999 I was severely depressed. Voice Dialog therapy allowed me to slowly become conscious of my blind spots; what was hidden in my unconscious mind. At that time, I was not able to see how my 32-year-old self was enmeshed with my 61-year-old mother. No boundaries. No awareness that I needed to live my own life, separate from hers: to identify my gifts and to offer them in the world, to live my own dharma. The enmeshed mother-daughter relationship had become potentially deadly for me.

And this is not to blame my mother.

Since doing Voice Dialog therapy, at this point in time when I am now 56, and Mum is 85, I am able to love my mother and keep healthy boundaries. I’ll be visiting her in Australia in July. I am also immensely grateful for the inner work Mum has done herself—I have a sense that the inner work done by each of us is what allows a healthier relationship.

Perhaps Voice Dialog therapy helped me to heal the universal “mother wound” I’ve read so much about everywhere lately. Perhaps healing the mother wound is part of this era of The Rising of the Divine Feminine. Perhaps when we are able to understand that mothers are also just human beings having a spiritual experience, we will be able to see the ROLE of motherhood—with its gifts and its challenges—with more clarity and compassion.

I’m immensely grateful to have received what I believe to be the most important gift from a mother: to feel loved. And I like that idea of “good enough” parenting. In Part 2 of THE BOOK, you will read how my mother pointed out to me that she had been a “good enough” mother. This was in response to my youthful arrogance in pointing out to her where she’d failed me as a mother — just a tiny example of what mothers deal with, when it comes to their kids.

In any case from what I’ve read, it sounds like Voice Dialog therapy is very similar to Internal Family Systems therapy which also seems to be everywhere these days. Perhaps more and more people are finding these kinds of models useful: recognizing that we are all made up of many different “parts” in addition to an Aware Ego or an Observing Self.

All this to say that I am now able to recognize my need to tend to and nurture all the different parts of my “self,” and sometimes that involves taking space from writing, and connecting with nature.

That said, please find below chapter 17 where you will also read about the healing of a very old wound.

Please note: if you are new to this Substack, I have been periodically releasing serialized chapters of The Rising of the Divine Feminine and the Buddhist Monks Across the Road: A Memoir, which are now free for one month after publication, after which they move behind the paywall.

To read a description of the whole book, please read the bottom of the post: An Invitation. You may also visit the Table of Contents. If you like what you’re reading and want to start from the beginning, I urge you to buy a subscription to keep reading.

Copyright © 2023 by Camilla Sanderson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or reprinted without the author’s written permission.

Chapter 17. The Bhagavad Gita and Healing, New Hampshire, May 2013

Daffodils, forsythia and cherry blossoms illumine my drive to the Tree of Life Interfaith Temple during the month of May. Driving by the local Walmart not far from the temple, I smile at the unlikely juxtaposition of the sacred space adjacent to the materialistic mecca. 

It’s our monthly gathering on a Saturday for interfaith seminary class. Sitting in circle, we lean into our backjacks, which makes sitting on the floor more comfortable. Once again, the flame of a candle lights up the center of our circle. Today, Rev. Stephanie talks about the Bhagavad Gita’s Chapter 13: The Field and the Knower.

“The Field and the Knower is another way to describe an observing awareness which we cultivate with our daily spiritual practice,” she says as the sun streams into the room, lighting her up from behind. “This kind of observing awareness can also be called our Inner Divinity.” 

She pauses for a moment, making eye contact with each of us in the circle. “And please do let me know, are you here, now, with us? Or is your mind at the local Walmart just down the road?” She giggles. We all smile back towards her, sensing into the presence we’re co-creating.

“You can imagine it like this,” she holds her left arm bent at the elbow about ninety degrees, her left hand in front of her chest with her palm facing upwards, horizontal to the ground, and she waves it slightly back and forth on that horizontal plane. 

“This represents your Humanity, or the Field,” she says. “This is the Field — where we get down and dig in the dirt and where all of our ‘stories’ unfold. Do you see my humanity in my palm facing upwards?” She smiles, her body posture open and relaxed.

Next, she holds up her right hand above and perpendicular to her left hand, with her right palm slightly gazing down on her left palm, and she moves her right hand back and forth on the vertical plane. “This represents your Inner Divinity, or the Knower. Can you sense into that Knower in yourself? 

“Hold up your hands. Show me your inner divinity observing your humanity,” she says. 

We all mirror how she holds her hands, the left palm facing upwards as the Field of our Humanity, and the right palm gazing slightly downward, as though it is our Inner Divinity / Knower, observing our Humanity / the Field.

“And it is from your Divinity that you can observe your Humanity — no judgment, simply observing.” She takes care to emphasize the difference between judging and observing.

The physicality of her depiction strikes a chord with me. Something clicks. I gain insight into this phenomenon of observing my humanity from my divinity.

Sitting in a daily spiritual practice for the past nine months, is perhaps part of how I gain this insight into this spacious awareness behind the thoughts that arise in my mind, and the emotions that pass through my body. When I remember to connect with this spaciousness, it helps to ease suffering in my human experience.

I’ve read about a similar concept in Buddhism called witness consciousness. Many Eastern religions have a variety of terms for this idea. But the underlying essence is the same: an act of observing, noticing, or witnessing without judgment, our Humanity: the story of our very human lives in the Field — from our Divinity: a kind of benevolent, compassionate, and empathetic observing awareness that exists within each of us, also called the Knower. 

~

The following day at home when doing my interfaith seminary homework at our pine-wood kitchen table, I read in Eknath Easwaran’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, where he says that the Gita’s subject is “the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage if he or she is to emerge from life victorious.” He writes about “the strenuous, long, drawn-out campaign we must wage to free ourselves from the tyranny of the ego, the cause of all our suffering and sorrow.” 

I learned a spiritual principle from Eckhart Tolle that also helps me with cultivating awareness around my ego: “Whenever you feel superior or inferior to another, that’s the ego.” I practice noticing when I may feel either superior or inferior — this red flag helps me to become more aware of when I’m identified with my ego.

I also later learn that whenever I compare myself with another, in any way, I’m identified with ego and ranking myself as ‘better’ or ‘worse.’ Rather than simply enjoying connecting with a person on a heart-and-soul level.

In my daily spiritual practice, I notice how cultivating this Inner Divinity / the Knower also helps to create some spaciousness around emotions that arise within me.

By observing my very human emotions, I don’t have to be identified with them. I can simply sit with the emotion, feel it in its entirety, and allow it the space to transform. This includes all emotions — all of what we label as both positive and negative: from joy, love, peace, bliss, ecstasy — to hate, anger, fear, despair, shame. And as the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor writes in My Stroke of Insight, all emotions last 90 seconds — and if it lasts longer, it’s because I’m clinging to the emotion.

When I cultivate this Inner Divinity / the Knower, in addition to lessening my suffering, I also strengthen my capacity to heal old, family battle scars. On a metaphoric level, it’s as though I’m able to open up the scar, pour in healing light, and dissolve any remaining undigested, un-metabolized painful emotions — what Tolle describes as “the Pain Body.” 

From my Inner Divinity, I can reflect back and observe the younger Camilla, having a human experience, sometimes painful, sometimes joyful. And when I’m able to make this observation, it creates space. 

It creates a space where I’m not identified with my ego or with any emotions that may have arisen or may arise in the present moment. I tell a story in my homework that I share below, that illustrates this phenomenon in my own life.

~

In the Bhagavad Gita’s Chapter 15, sloka 2.3, Krishna tells Arjuna to cultivate the courage to fight the battle that is his destiny to fight, and it’s a battle that happens to be with members of his own family.

For me, the first meaningful aspect of this sloka is about the courage one needs to live one’s dharma.

And the second meaningful aspect is that Arjuna must face his family on the battlefield.

It’s a simple fact of life: experiences with family — my family of origin, in-laws, or my partner — seem to intensify any joy and / or pain that may arise within me.

Perhaps the reason my emotions felt more intense during that ‘coming of age’ passage of time, was simply because everything feels more intense during teenage years. I’m not sure. But I do know that if I do not heal old wounds, I do not dissolve the Pain Body, so it remains in existence and can be triggered, which causes me to suffer.

Perhaps this is simply the nature of family: you face them on the emotional / metaphoric battlefield, you feel all the joy and the pain, and you keep showing up with love. 

~

My Bhagavad Gita homework questions lead me to reflect on an old, family battle scar. 

I’ve just turned sixteen. A friend of my mother’s takes me to have my hair transformed by a swanky hair stylist in Double Bay, an expensive inner-city suburb in Sydney also known as “Double Pay.” The hairdresser asks if I’m ready for a dramatic change. I acquiesce. He cuts off my long braids of brown-hair and shapes what’s left into a pixie cut. He then pulls a soft rubber cap over my skull and with what looks like a crochet hook, he pulls tufts of hair through the small holes. I wince in pain each time the hook hits my scalp. At the point when I look like a hedgehog with tufts of brown hair poking through the cap, he applies a kind of bleach. After waiting for what seems like forever, he removes the cap and washes then blows dry my hair.

I look at my image in the mirror, amazed at the metamorphosis from a girl into someone who looks like a blossoming young woman. 

Is that me? 

Recently, my family have moved into an apartment in North Sydney so Dad doesn’t have to commute the hour-an-a-half to our home in Pittwater. But we still visit home on the weekends. I think this may be a last-ditch effort for Mum and Dad to save their marriage. They’ve been fighting a lot lately. I’m in a new high school for year eleven and twelve, in preparation to take the High School Certificate exams that will determine what I’ll study at university. My older sister, Penny, with her honey-blond curls, blue eyes, and sharp wit, already left school when she turned sixteen two years ago — much to Dad’s horror, but with Mum’s support. 

This is part of what Mum and Dad fight about. They have such different ideas about what all four of us sisters should do — especially when it comes to education and health.

Penny moved out and lives in a shared apartment now. Even though Dad objected to her leaving school, he gave her a job at the branch office of the Canadian computer software company he opened here in Sydney. I guess he thinks that at least this will give her an opportunity to learn something practical. 

Each day after school, when I get off the train at North Sydney station, I run-walk home to check our mailbox — a gray metal rectangle, like a brick in a wall of many mailboxes in the lobby of the apartment building. I’m hoping for a letter from Alex. 

My whole family met Alex when we lived in France for a year. Dad’s work at IBM transferred us there. Alex’s family lived in the apartment downstairs. I was ten, Penny twelve, and Alex sixteen. My family were supposed to live in Paris for three years for Dad’s job, but perhaps because Mum didn’t speak French and my younger sisters were so small — Misty an infant and Stasia nearly three — Mum became homesick for Australia and we returned after only one year.  

Even though we’ve been back in Australia for the past five years, Alex and I only recently began to write to each other. At first, we were just friendly pen pals. But his past few letters have been different. More intimate. Even romantic. He’s been revealing his innermost thoughts and feelings to me.

Today when I open the mailbox and find a small packet postmarked from Paris with his handwriting, my heart flutters wildly. I take the elevator up to our apartment, run inside my bedroom and close the door. Opening the brown paper packet, I find several pages of light and crinkly pale-blue airmail paper along with a cassette tape. I slip the cassette into my portable tape player and while listening to a compilation of his favorite music, I read his letter in the privacy of my own boundaried space. 

He’s twenty-one and serving a compulsory year in the French army. He writes about how he hates it. I’ve written to him about how I hate my family life with Mum and Dad fighting all the time. He writes that he’ll be finishing his army service in June and he wants to come and visit. I’m thrilled.

I tell Mum and she says he can stay at our home in Pittwater.

Alex’s letters are the one thing I look forward to. School sucks, Mum and Dad fight all the time, and Penny has moved out. I can’t wait for him to visit.

The day he arrives, I drive Mum’s car to the airport and pick him up by myself. I’m proud of the fact that I got my driver’s license the day I turned sixteen. I wait for Alex at the gate, but when I see him, I feel awkward. He looks so pale and his manner is strange. Everything we’ve been writing — pouring our hearts out to each other — now feels like a fantasy. Our letters felt cozy, warm and affectionate. But now he seems so distant. This is not how I imagined it would be.

I drive the hour it takes us to get to Church Point, where we park the car. I walk with him to the commuter wharf, get in our fourteen-foot aluminum dinghy, and drive us in our boat to our home in Lovett Bay. You can only get there by water. He loves it. Pittwater is a magical place. 

I give him a tour of our single level, two thousand square foot Western red cedar home my parents built among the gum trees. He loves the house, but I still feel awkward with him. There’s no ease or intimacy like we’d had in our letters. He doesn’t try and kiss me or anything. Maybe he feels awkward too. I have to go back to North Sydney for school, but he stays in Pittwater. Mum and my three sisters drive up to visit him during the week. I catch a bus back the next weekend, and Mum comes to pick me up at Church Point in our motor boat. 

The day is overcast and gray. I sit in the front of our 14-foot aluminium dinghy, my body providing the weight needed to keep the bow down. Mum sits at the back with her hand on the throttle of the twenty-horse-power motor. About five minutes into the trip, out in the middle of Pittwater, she yells to me above the noise of the motor. I can’t hear her, so she slows down.

“Camilla, something has happened between Penny and Alex,” she said, her brow furrowed.

“They had sex.”

What? She reiterates what has transpired.

I’m gutted… like a caught fish sliced open from nose to tail: intestines, stomach, heart, all yanked out and cast into the ocean. I look out over the desolate, charcoal-blue water. Dark clouds block the sun. The dull ache of the outboard-motor throbs through my being as the wind plasters my hair against my face. It looks at though the dark grey thunderous clouds above will break open any moment with heavy rain. I inhale the stormy smell of saltwater and metallic taste of negative ions.

All those feelings of blossoming into a woman with the possibility of a romance with a Parisian boyfriend, plummet to the depths of the ocean. 

Will I ever have a boyfriend? Will any man ever love me?

We arrive home, I go straight to my room, and close the door. 

Penny is such a bitch and why is Mum taking her side? Alex will go back to France so I won’t have to see him again, but Penny will always be my sister and I’ll have to live with her betrayal for ever.

Ever since I was little, when I invited friends home to play, time and time again I complained to Mum, “Penny took my friend away.”

Maybe it was a big sister thing, maybe her jealousy swole up like a balloon filled with poison. She just didn’t seem to have any understanding of how I felt so shattered.

~

I did manage to survive my teenage melodrama and within a few months, Alex was out of the picture and Penny fell in love with Adi, a gifted mathematician and musician who also worked for Dad. Adi loved to say with a cheeky grin, that he was dating the boss’s daughter.

It wasn’t until Penny was with Adi that she gained any insight into how her actions had affected me. Adi asked her outright, “And how do you think Camilla felt when you had sex with Alex?” This was the first time I sensed a shift in Penny. A glimmer of understanding of her impact.

~

How the wisdom in the Bhagavad Gita helped me to heal:

In answering penetrating homework questions from Rev. Stephanie’s book of the Gita, I re-opened this thirty-year-old family battle scar. I investigated how I felt betrayed by my sister and not supported by my mother.

Even thirty years later, I still had a part of me that didn’t want to forgive either one of them. In my Humanity or the Field of being human, this part of me could not believe that “Penny did that to me” and that “Mum didn’t stick up for me.”

I brought these feelings into my spiritual practice and sat with them, providing time and a safe space to feel the feelings, and digest and metabolize the last of this remaining part of the Pain Body.

The whole experience made me wonder: is our relationship with our family-of-origin the root of all joy and pain in the world?

We’re born into community within our family, and whatever is unresolved in our familial realm, we bring out into the world when we leave home.

Perhaps if every human being spent time doing the inner work to heal old family wounds, we may each add one drop to the oceanic movement towards an evolution of consciousness that we need to effect world peace.

Perhaps there’s an undeniable truth in this spiritual principle: When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.

When investigating and speculating about the story I share above, perhaps it was because Mum was in the midst of her own marriage falling apart, that she never sat down with Penny and me to talk about what happened and our feelings about it. And maybe, at the time, Penny was simply unconscious of the effect her actions would have on me. Perhaps this lack of recognition of her impact on me was simply a mirror of the dynamics playing out between our divorcing parents at the time. In our family, it was not often recognized when emotional pain was inflicted upon another family member. No one paused and said, “Ouch, that hurt. I feel wounded.” It was as though we were not allowed to dwell in our pain. But by not being permitted to ‘dwell,’ sometimes emotional pain was not even acknowledged. Maybe this was a simple lack of respect for each other. Who knows? Family dynamics are intimately complex.

But through shifting my perspective from blaming Penny for hurting me, to simply observing what happened, and investigating the emotions of pain and betrayal around this event and what may be possible to learn from it, I gain the opportunity to let go of a victim identity. 

It’s only by identifying with my very human emotions that I get stuck in victim consciousness. How could she do that to me???

And when I’m identified with victim consciousness I get to be “morally superior.” I’d never do that to her! And identifying as morally superior is simply another unconscious aspect of ego. Ego can be such a tricky little thing.

By opening myself up to this ancient family history, and observing from my Inner Divinity / the Knower, the Humanity in the Field of my 16-year-old self, and in my 18-year-old sister, and in my 46-year-old mother — who was younger then than I am now — I create enough space around this experience to sense into an energy of heart expansion. 

And it’s this heart-based evolution of consciousness that I am actively interested in cultivating. 

When I want to make myself laugh about all of this, I remember the Ram Das quote, “You think you’re so enlightened? Go spend a week with your family.” 

~

I notice that because of the complexity and metaphoric nature of the Bhagavad Gita, each time I re-read a section, I gain new insights into how it may apply to my life today and provide me with additional layers of healing — which shows me how this ancient sacred text is still deeply relevant.

Click for chapter 18.