MY (MAGICAL) PURPLE COAT

SUNDAY IS FUN DAY (Special)

Miracles are fun.  I love it when I experience them.  Sometimes sad things that happen can result in very happy events after time.  When I became a spiritual warrior, someone who fights for justice through truth and non-violence, I was given a purple coat by a group of strangers, people that I hardly knew.  It was not until 30 years later that I realized their gift was magical!

The Warm Springs Indian Nation is located in Warm Springs, Oregon in the USA; and I worked with a spiritual elder there, Lucinda Green, who was one of my spiritual teachers.

Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, my Guru who was living in India, performed a long-distance miracle at the Warm Springs reservation with some Vibuthi (sacred ash from his ashram, Prasanthi Nilayam). On one of my visits to the reservation, I gave Lucinda some Vibuthi blessed by Sai Baba.  She got a plastic sandwich bag out of the kitchen and put the little packet, about the size of a stick of gum, into it.  Then she nailed the plastic bag to the longhouse wall under a round mirror with three feathers stuck in it (that is the symbol for the Warm Springs religion: THREE FEATHERS).

We said our good-byes and I promised I would visit again before I left for India.  When I returned to the reservation, a few months later, the plastic bag was still hanging on the wall under the mirror.  BUT it was overflowing with Vibuthi. The Vibuthi was just piling up by itself, multiplying right in front of my eyes.  It had changed from grey to deep black.  I walked right up to it to get a closer look.  It just kept deepening as if there was an invisible faucet dripping the sacred ash into the plastic bag.

Then I looked at Lucinda.  I said, ‘It's black now!’ She stared right back at me and shouted, “Don’t you ever question the ways of God.”

I had never told her that I believed my Guru, Sai Baba, to be God.  However, I understood that she knew this increasing Vibuthi was coming from her God, who she called, The Creator, and that He was making it black instead of grey for His own reasons, just for FUN perhaps.

Before I left the USA for India to end up living here, which I had never anticipated, The Warm Springs people invited me to a few special gatherings, most notably a private healing dance where they removed all sorts of negativity from me—energies that they could see,  but that I could not.

After that they asked me to give a talk on incest to the whole reservation.  I felt weird and I told Lucinda that I didn't believe anyone there would identify much with a white middle class woman's story of childhood sexual trauma.  But, she assured me that she and other elders had been guided to me in the first place for just that special purpose.  I forgot to mention that they had contacted me by phone in California where I had been living; and they paid my airfare and all other costs to meet them on my first visit.  When I kept asking how they could possibly know me, how they had gotten my phone number, Lucinda simply said, “We have our ways.” This was before Internet even existed!

I touched the beaded necklace I was wearing.  I had found in a grocery bag one day—a necklace that I had tried to return to the store but the manager insisted he would not keep it in the lost and found—a necklace that I had worn everyday after it came to me. Lucinda replied to my unspoken question.  “It’s Apache, and yes, that was one of the ways…..”

Indeed!  Now she was assuring me that I was the most convincing person to relay that incest and sexual trauma happen outside the reservation.  Perpetrators are from all walks of life, all religions, and they are not lurking in the shadows; they are often living right inside our homes, working in our schools, preaching in our churches….

The victims as well as the perpetrators of incest and childhood sexual trauma at the reservation never imagined that "nice white people" had this particular problem.  Anyway, I did give the talk to a very crowded longhouse and the result overwhelmed me.  Mostly, everyone—men, women, and even children got in a line to come up and cry with me and tell me their stories. It was a humbling experience.

Later, the beautiful and original hand-painted, all-weather purple coat was presented to me. Lucinda explained that the designs were actual copies of the ancient cave paintings of her people.  “She who Watches” is the female deity or primal spirit who sees all and observes all in silence—The Witness. I understood that I was being gifted this for my willingness to share my story.  Lucinda said, “You will wear this as you travel around the world and it will make people happy.”

Her words came true. That’s the magic part!  The coat has crossed many oceans and visited many lands; and people come over to me and ask me about it.  They like hearing about the Native American Warms Springs Nation, about my travels, about Sai Baba, and about my complete recovery from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I suffered for years as a result of the abuse.  As it turns out, my magical purple coat has literally made thousands happy.  But I am the happiest!

Have a Super Sunday filled with Lot’s of Fun!!

SECRET MEMORIES

When I became a published writer I began losing pieces of my private life.  The first thing to go was time.  Living in the suburbs, being married and raising a family became my second priority.  There was a new baby in my life and it was called, “My Work.”  This became my first priority and quite a few relatives, friends and neighbors did not like it.  This was before they even knew what exactly I was sitting in my little studio, attached to the garage, writing about.

   My first book of poetry, Durango, came out in 1979 after about four long years of wrestling with my inner demons.  It told the secret side of my life, told the pain I had gone through as a child, as a survivor of incest and sexual trauma. It was also feminist to the core—Amazonian in its strength of purpose: To warn women to protect themselves from their own worst enemy, themselves.  It predicted, though I could not see it then, what was about to happen to my life as I had known it.

 The fact that Durango was poetry and not prose made me feel that I had still managed to keep the ugliest experiences somewhat hidden, while at the same time exposing them. But readers are sleuths.  They not only read between the lines, they read the minds of writers.  Some began identifying with the persona of these poems. I was shocked by this.  I had thought my life so unique, the damage so especially my own.  Well, it turns out that about 90% of humanity has not had a happy childhood.

So, not long after that, everything just went weird for me.  I remember how I had written that book to stay alive, to keep myself from succumbing to the depression I was going through as a post-cancer-surgery patient, a suburban housewife suddenly addicted to writing, trying to be honest while living in the shadow of my own lies, trying to convince myself that life has meaning, has purpose when I felt quite contrary to that.  I just couldn’t hide the truth of who I really was anymore—an angry, hurt, neglected, abused, incested, and now cancer-damaged, extremely sensitive “child.”  This emotionally arrested child was imprisoned in an adult body with a highly educated adult mind.

  If God hadn’t flung me out of my closet writing space into the public arena, I might not have eventually celebrated my past. It made me strong, not weak.  It made me hyper-vigilant, not blind.  It made me out-spoken, not silent.  It was going through the horror of it that made me capable of opening my heart to others.  I am certainly no Emily Dickenson.  I was not meant to be a recluse.  My spirit longed to soar, not just to fly with the eagles, but far above the clouds.

 At the time, though, even while giving readings from Durango, I was tormented, as twisted up as a corkscrew run over by a truck. Fear grew into a perpetual state, relieved only by sleep.  Sometimes I became so full of terror I could barely function.  On occasion I would be paralyzed.  I started to have migraines that lasted up to four or five days. And often I felt nauseous, the way I had when I was pregnant.  Now that the book was out, so was I.  I was naked in suburbia, naked as a newborn baby.  But there was no lullaby to hush me up.

 What’s more, for me to write Durango was a paradox at that point in my life.  For example, though I wrote the truth of what had happened, I had no conscious memories of the actual acts of rape committed against me. Conscious memories did not come until 1990.  Prior to that I knew I was “molested” but I was not connected to the images or to the pain of those past events. I was writing from behind the veil, so to speak.  Once the truth came out, there was no more veil to hide behind.

  It was as though the persona, the writer of that book, was another aspect of Terry, the dutiful and the sacrificial.  It was an alternative personality that one of my psychotherapists would later identify as “a helper.”  Here was the writer who dared to explode the Keeper of the Secrets.  Not surprisingly, this persona was also the Integrator, She who would weave all the parts together, She who would continue to be the Warrior, the Wounded Healer, who would fight for the rights of others, She who would eventually merge with the God Self.  But I was also the She who was the Brand New Poet, the Voice that had to speak in metaphors and similes to not completely strip the sheets off the corpse.  Now I am grateful about this emergence, the butterfly easing itself out of the confines of the cocoon. I’m not ashamed to stand as bare as an egg in front of you—in front of myself.

Back then, though, I felt raw and defiled, betrayed by my own pen that opened me up and showed readers I wanted more, much more out of life than what I had—a life that other women I knew envied.  I hated the fact that my own work made me feel ashamed.  I could have felt proud, but I didn’t.  For one thing, I wasn’t ready to be a person who had survived incest, a woman with excessive passions, a woman who believed in love, but not monogamy, a woman who refused to be kept, a woman relishing her bits of freedom.  In those days, very few were talking about sex abuse, wife abuse, child abuse.

  My mentor, the poet Anne Sexton, who was also my field faculty advisor at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, had made such historic references to the abuse of women in her earliest books, and so had Sylvia Plath.  This is why they became my most influential modern poet heroes.  But unlike them, I came to see I was breaking new ground. I had no intentions of doing myself in, as they had done, because of the trauma; I was going to fight back.  I was determined to survive.  Nevertheless,   I was still quite split.

After Durango was out in the bookstores, I started wearing dark glasses every day (and night) of the week.  I began isolating myself from the suburbs and the small-town gossip mongers I believed were there.  I quit the PTA and rarely attended churches of any kind. I was soon spending more and more time in Cambridge and in Boston with what Lee Kennedy, the father of our three children, Lee Michael, Shaila, and Eugene, called my “Bohemian friends.”  But the truth is, I felt separate from them too.  At that early beginning of my career, they were after artistic kudos, most of them.  This was the way the Arts World functioned then.  If you couldn’t get money, artists felt, you should at least get acceptance by your peers. On the other hand, I was more interested in ridding myself of my fears.  I was looking for a God I could live with, one that would love me and save me, one that would explain me to myself.  Finally, I could see that in order for me to answer the mystic question: Who am I? I would have to start again at the very beginning and look for clues to my existence.  I believed that to understand who I am, I needed to know who I had been before.

Who is the 14th Dalai Lama?

His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama, Jampel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, was born in Takster, Amdo Province, in Tibet on July 6, 1935.  His parents were humble farmers but at the age of two he was recognized by a party of special monks searching for the reincarnation of the late 13^th Dalai Lama.  Predictions of the location of the child’s birth were exact and this is how the search party was able to locate him. On deeper examination it was discovered that his body was marked in the traditional way of his previous incarnations.

The title Dalai Lama was originally offered to Sonam Gyatso, the 3^rd Dalai Lama, by the then Mongolian Prince, Altan Quan.  The Mongol word Dalai, Gyatso in Tibetan, means “Ocean of Wisdom”.

In 1939, at the age of four, he was brought to Lhasa, the capitol city of Tibet, where he was enthroned in 1940.  There he began his education living at the Potala Palace in winter and at Norbulingka Palace in summer. It wasn’t long before his extensive studies included Logic; Prajnaparamita—discriminative awareness, the bodhisattva’s path, emptiness, non-duality and the skilful means of great compassion; Madhyamaka—The Middle Way, between the extremes of eternalism and nihilism; Abhidharma—phenomenology, metaphysics, or direct knowledge; and Vinaya, monastic discipline and ethical codes which regulate the life of an ordained monk or nun.

In addition, he studied history, poetry, astrology and later, advanced Tantra.  As a teenager he began learning English and at 16 he assumed full temporal responsibility of the leader of Tibet due to the advancing Chinese Communist occupation.  Communism had taken hold of China and now it was forcing its way into Tibet. The residents of the Snow Land who resisted the takeover of their towns, villages, and monasteries were being slaughtered by the heavily armed soldiers.

His Holiness, in his attempts to save his country, communicated with presidents and prime ministers around the globe.  Few acknowledged the plight of the Tibetan people. However, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru offered him asylum. 

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist leader, Mao Tse Tung, invited His Holiness to come to China.  The Dalai Lama was just 19 then, but he hoped that he could reverse Mao’s plan.  Mao listened to him, but said that no reconciliation was possible between the Tibetan people and the Chinese.  He said that unless Tibetans agreed to be ruled by China they would have to face the consequences of the invading military forces.  He told the “boy” he was determined to take over Tibet entirely and to subjugate the Tibetans who would not agree to be “Chinese”.

With little help except for natives armed with farm tools and few clans of warriors led by regional kings, the hordes of well-armed soldiers easily massacred millions of the small population of approximately six million.  Thousands of families who survived were displaced, homes were burned and looted, farm animals were taken, incalculable sacred items were destroyed, and monasteries and holy places were turned into rubble.

On March 17, 1959, His Holiness left Lhasa sick with fever, and suffering from a very heavy heart.  It was just seven days after the civil uprising there against the invaders. People continued to be murdered and imprisoned. The Dalai Lama hoped that he could help his people from across the border in India—the Birthplace of Buddha, the country that offered him refuge.

After an arduous journey on foot and on horseback, The Dalai Lama gratefully accepted sanctuary in India, where he remains to this day, living in exile from his Beloved Motherland, the Roof of the World.

More than 100,000 of his fellow Tibetans were able to follow him into exile, most of them resettling in India.  Many Tibetans still risk their lives and escape into Buddha’s homeland seeking exile there.  From India many migrate to other countries. Today the once unknown Tibetans are known on every continent.   And the Dalai Lama, who resides in Dharamsala in the north of India, travels the globe spreading Buddha’s teachings and giving lectures on peace, universal responsibility, love, compassion, and the need to stop engaging in wars.  He has won prestigious prizes, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.  He has also written  many books, including:  My Land and My People; Freedom in Exile; Opening the Eye of New Awareness; A Human Approach to World Peace; Kindness, Clarity and Insight, and The Kalachakra Tantra.

The present day Chinese government declares His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama a “separatist” a “demon” and works at destroying his reputation, seemingly without let up. Tibetans and some Chinese who support him are imprisoned for their beliefs.

Amazingly, however, groups of the most prominent citizens of China are now becoming his supporters.  Artists, writers, and musicians, for instance, risk incarceration for work that depicts “The Ocean of Wisdom Lama” as a hero and savior of the Tibetan people.

As an independent journalist covering his empowerments, his teachings on Buddhist texts, and his discourses throughout India, I have been graced to have been in his presence many times and to have had press interviews with him.  Consequently I have written extensively on how to incorporate his teachings on Buddhist principles into our day to day lives.  Most of the essays presented here have been published in newspapers in India and abroad.  I have now compiled all of these and other essays into a manuscript which I am presenting on my blog.  I am interested in getting the information out to those who may choose to use it.

In addition, I write on the plight of Tibetans today, who live both in and out of Tibet; and I have given free lectures in Spain and in the USA on this subject.  My fifth book of poetry, I AM TIBETAN, published by Esteban Dias, for Tiger Moon Productions, has been translated into Spanish and Polish.  I am committed to the Tibetan cause—getting their country back, and letting the Tibetan refugees return to their Mother Land.  My deepest wish is to one day walk hand-in- hand with Tibetans and their supporters across the border into a FREE TIBET.

Terry's Words

Click on the above link to read some insightful incidents of Terry Reis Kennedy.

His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama

Click on the above link to read about His Holiness The 14th Dalai Lama.

Who Is Sai Baba? Part 1

The first time I saw a picture of Sai Baba in 1990 on the dashboard of a pick-up truck in Laguna Beach, California, I thought he looked like a New Zealand Maori.  I said, “Who is that?”   J, the owner of the pick-up and the manager of the apartment building where I’d just rented, said, “He’s Sai Baba.”

On hearing the words, Sai Baba, I nearly fell down onto the ground hit by the force of what I can only describe as a kick to my heart!  It was not a slap.  It was not a punch.  It was a full on forceful Karate kick! Struggling to hold back the flood of feelings that were suddenly welling up inside me, I demanded, “What is he?” You see, I realized that something unseen and superhuman had produced that kick which had knocked the breath out of my lungs.  And, I knew that whatever that Force was it had radiated from the picture on the dashboard.   J replied, “He’s an Avatar.” 

Ouch! In my vanity, I didn’t want this new acquaintance to suspect that I had no idea what the word Avatar meant.  After all, I had only recently handed over my apartment-rental agreement stating, for the record, that I was practically a genius—an adjunct professor of English, a world-traveled journalist, a published poet.  How could I suddenly admit that I was uninformed?  I couldn’t.  So I just kept quiet.

As soon as I could, though, I looked in my unabridged dictionary.  Avatar, according to Webster, is the concept in Hinduism of God coming to earth and taking a human form. Whew!  I felt relieved.  The drums of Hinduism were miles away from Cliff Drive.  You had to cross continents and oceans to really feel their beat.  They couldn’t influence independent-thinking me! What a fool I was. I only needed to walk past the Indian restaurant in the nearby Hari Krishna Temple to smell the curry changes on the wind.

Almost immediately after seeing his photo, I began obsessing about Sai Baba, about the Avatar concept, and about being kicked in the heart.   Eventually, I embarked on learning more about him.  At first J, a former California Highway Patrol officer, and his Hindu wife, N, didn’t seem to want to discuss Sai Baba. We could talk about gardening, cooking, politics, the weather, any subject, in fact, except the Avatar.  I found this odd.  In retrospect, maybe they didn’t want to be thought of as proselytizing. Then one day, N took pity on me.  She gave me a copy of a book about Sai Baba, The Ultimate Experience, by an English psychotherapist, Phyllis Krystal.  The more I read, the more I doubted.

But, paradoxically, as I read and re-read The Ultimate Experience, looking for the propaganda, experiencing the writing with my poet’s intuition and analyzing it with my investigative journalist’s mind, I realized that Phyllis Krystal was sincere, credible and that she believed Sai Baba, her Guru,  was  God.  Now I felt the urge to investigate the authenticity of Sai Baba for myself. 

First I asked N if she thought he was God.  She said, “Yes.” Aha!  But, of course, she is a Hindu.  Then I asked her if her husband also believed Sai Baba was God.  An ex-cop wouldn’t be tricked by a scam, I reasoned.  She also said, “Yes.”  In this split second I could actually feel my mind opening.  I had been accustomed to the idea that God was omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.  So, I reasoned that God being God, could do anything—which included taking on the form of an Indian man and living in India.  Apparently, N sensed a shift in my energy field; the resistance was lifting. She looked me straight in the eyes and suggested that I go ahead and test Sai Baba’s divinity myself.  

She smiled so sweetly and said, “Just talk to him like you are talking to me.”

Right after I left her I entered my adjacent apartment.  I locked the door from inside and I sat down on the bedroom carpet next to a small table where I kept a candle and an incense holder.  I had been a consistent meditator for nearly 20 years.  Over those years I had felt I had made many contacts with God who I had perceived as a kind of ethereal Holy Spirit, and, yes, very far away from me.  But today I felt different.  I kept my eyes open and  I began conversing with Sai Baba as if he were physically there beside me.  I had the help being able to stare at a small photo that N had given to me.  It was a picture of him in a meditation-like pose. God meditating?  Hummm. I did wonder about that.

 Nevertheless, I felt very excited by this Kick-me-in-the-heart Afro haired “guy”.  Prior to doing this secret testing,  I had asked N why, if Sai Baba was God and I had been praying to God for lifetimes, perhaps, and not feeling as if my prayers were necessarily answered, how was praying to him now, in this Hindu Avatar form going to benefit me?  N admitted that she didn’t know how it worked.  “It’s a mystery,” she said. But she assured me that I would get an answer.

And I did!  I knew exactly what to ask for.  I had just gotten back form an 18-month fellowship to Australia to study and report on  the writers and the writing scene there for Sand Script Magazine, a Cape Cod, Massachusetts literary journal published by Barbara Dunning; and I needed a car in order to get a good teaching job nearby.  I had sold my old Ford Fiesta before leaving in order to have extra cash.  I knew from experience that California bus routes were not very efficient for getting travelers to and from nearby places.  For example, if I wanted excellent paying jobs teaching English  they were waiting for me at community colleges only 30 and 35 miles away.  But the bus trips would take three and four hours—one way! Meantime, there were no return buses at the late hour I’d be traveling back to Laguna Beach. So, I saw a car as my first priority. 

I decided to “test” Sai Baba’s powers by asking him for a car.  It now seems ridiculous, asking God for a car when you could ask for something really spiritually significant, like Liberation itself.  Obviously,  I was not as  informed about divine matters in those days, as I had led myself to belief.  I didn’t even pray.  I remember saying to Sai Baba, “If you are really God, then show me that you are by getting me a car.” How egomaniacal it now sounds.

On the other hand, I was sincere while I was speaking and strangely frightened at the same time. In fact, I observed that my manner was child-like.  I felt shy and awkward.  My grown-up self warned that maybe I was playing with fire.  I had been raised a strict Catholic and my idea of God then was a far-off Entity, so far off, in fact, that I couldn’t even conjure up an image.  Meanwhile, the picture I had of Jesus in my mind came from years of indoctrination that he was the only “begotten” son of God.  Sadly, my Jesus image was covered with so much blood and suffering that I didn’t really want to look at it. As a kid I used to think, if God put his own son through so much torture I certainly don’t’ stand a chance.  What’s more, we were taught that we were so full of sin that we had to go to confession once a week.  Yet, at the same time we were told that Jesus had redeemed us by suffering and dying for us on the cross.  It was all too frightening and confusing for me.  So, basically, over the years I became a respecter of all religions but a practitioner of none.

Nothing religious or spiritual that  I had ever experienced over my lifetime including living with Native Americans, participating in their sweats and medicine dances, had  prepared me for the possibility that God, in 1990, could be a 64-year-old, small-boned, 108-pound, Indian man with jet-black, bushy, African-type hair.  But here I was, sitting cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom, speaking to that very image.  I was talking to Sai Baba just as if I were speaking to you.  When I finished I got up, left the apartment, and walked down to the beach to watch the sun set. 

Within three days I received a greeting card in the mail.  I have no recollection of registering my new address at the Post Office.  But the card was addressed to my new flat!  I was stunned.  When I opened the card I saw it was from an elder woman, L, whose home I had stayed at for a few days on arriving back in Laguna Beach and who I had been very close to for a few years.  I used to take her shopping, to the bank, or out to lunch, as I lived near her and she had difficulty getting around.  I liked her company very much and enjoyed inviting her to go out with me—not  as any volunteer service for the old, for I thought of her as a very dear and savvy friend.  L talked about God a good deal of our time together; and she was herself a disciplined daily meditator.  In fact, we had met each other in a group, The Infinite Way, based on the writings of Joel Goldsmith, a mystic, Vedanta teacher, and healer.

Well, anyhow, the card was from her and it said, “Thank you for being such a wonderful person.”  Enclosed in the card was a check for $1200 US dollars!  I was very pleased but didn’t connect it to my “prayer” to Sai Baba.  I called L right away and told her I knew she was not a wealthy woman and that I could not accept her gift.  She protested when I insisted that I must return the check.

In fact, she scolded me and told me that I had to keep it because a couple of nights before, while she was meditating, God spoke to her and told her to give me the money because I needed it.  “I told him I didn’t want to give you the money,” she admitted.  “But he said I had to.  He told me the amount to give you too.  That’s why I can’t take it back,” she said.  “I’m just doing what God has told me to do.”

To be continued...