Oct 03 2007
Oneness Blessing Adventures 4
Note: this is part of a series. It presents experiences and teachings, as I understood them, that I had at the Oneness University in August, 2007. To start at the beginning click here.
“Anything, when completely experienced, leads to joy.” -Sri Ammabhagavan
The Flowering of the Heart
One of the many things that I loved about the Oneness Process is that it was energetic as well as somatic. We didn’t just talk about transforming, we experienced it through our bodies. The experience was created through an intent or prayer that we asked from our hearts to the Divine. And whoosh! Off we’d go on an amazing journey.
This was occurring on an individual basis throughout the process, but my first experience of it in a group blew my mind. It was during the first week and we were focusing on healing the heart so that it could flower, ie. open. We were going to release old hurts with parents, partners and expartners, children and siblings. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d done a lot of that work already…or so I thought.
Our guide that day was Purnima (which means full moon). She was also the guide assigned to my room. We would have individual sessions with her during our breaks to check how we were doing in the process. In these meetings she didn’t come across as a warm and fuzzy type. I came to realize she knew how to be compassionate without being overly sentimental…a rare trait in a woman. She is also extremely powerful.
After giving us some context, Purnima asked us to pray from our hearts for a release from our hurts, then turned on some wonderful heart-centered music, and said, “Cry! Feel the pain!” Ten seconds later, the whole room of 140 men and women was wailing…including me. My body would jerk, I’d have an emotional rush of sadness and then something I hadn’t thought of for years would surface in my mind. It all happened faster than I can write about it. At a certain point she asked us to switch our reference point and see what had been going on for our parents (or whoever) at the time the event occurred. Instead, I was shown two different times in my parents lives that shaped who they are today. One was my mother as a young teenager, dealing with soon-to-be divorced parents, who had screaming matches in front of her. The other was my dad as an idealistic, filled-with-light, young man, standing in Nagasaki, Japan, ten days after the atomic bomb was dropped. He was staring at the imprint of vaporized bodies in the pavement. In that instant, he awakened to the darkness within mankind.
As I was crying and releasing, my witness observer was wondering how in the world Purnima was going to bring it to an end. Through my own experiences of leading retreats I knew that when a group gets wailing on that level , the inner Irish within all of us takes over, and it can go on and on and on. Purnima stopped it in an instant. What she said was, “Now feel the love!” And in a blink of an eye we were enveloped in the most amazing feelings of love. Divine love for us, our parents’ love for us, our love for our parents, our love for the Divine, filled us up and overflowed into the room. Soon the whole room, drunk on love, was laughing! We stood up and danced in joy. In my journal I described that day as “The Great Cry, The Great Laugh!” Shortly after that during a meditation I said goodby to my wounded child who disappeared forever. What took me by surprise was the initial sadness at saying goodby. I had been holding and protecting her for so long I didn’t want to let go. Life can be strange that way—we don’t let go of that which we most want to heal. In my journal I wrote that my feeling after letting her go was one of shy nervousness. Who is this inner child who’s only known love?
New Insights
After each wonderous healing journey that we went through, I would come back and have amazing insights. One in particular was about my father. At some time as a very young child, I had perceived that my older sister was my father’s favorite. After my sister died last year, I found myself increasingly angry with him. It was irrational but I couldn’t shake it. In a meditation shortly after the above healing, I recalled a promise I had made to myself at the age of three. I promised myself that when my sister was gone (how did I know that?), I would become the favorite daughter. Naturally it didn’t happen. Just because someone has died doesn’t mean we stop having a relationship with them. After the “flowering of my heart” I became okay with what I am… just a daughter. That’s enough. One of the four keys in our teachings was self-acceptance. I began to achieve that, that day.
After being shown my parents at an extremely critical time in both of their early lives, I also came to realize that at the point of our greatest love, we stand vulnerable to our greatest hurt. The challenge is to not deny our love, nor become hard-hearted but to just experience whatever is happening until we return to joy. And there’s no getting around it—the only way to experience is through the physical body.
They Drop the Bombshell and We Break Silence
On our 8th day, I entered the meditation hall, as always with anticipation for what we would learn and do that day. That was the day the dhasas/guides/teachers decided to break the news of the changes in the process. I think they underestimated our response. The poor guide who got to be our messenger was energetically pummeled by our group’s reactions of outrage, grief, denial and indignation. Their big mistake was sending in just one guide to tell us. After that, whenever there was a potentially touchy subject, four or five guides would come in and beam energetic support to the “messenger.”
To understand the effect of the bombshell, I need to provide some context. The Oneness Process was created by Sri Bhagavan and Amma and the dhasas. It stands alone on it own merit. However, Sri Bhagavan and Sri Amma are avatars. These are highly advanced, enlightened souls who are incarnated. Their vibrational energy is such that just to be in their presence can cause instant enlightenment, spontaneous healing and manifestation of every heart’s desire. Part of the Oneness Process, prior to our group, was to be with them in a sitting meditation, known as darshan. I was particularly looking forward to this part of the process. I could go to India and skip seeing the Taj Mahal, but to sit with an enightened avatar was a must.
Not to be. The announcement that day was that the process was changing forever. There would no longer be any darshans with Amma or Bhagavan. A tsunami couldn’t have hit us harder (or the steamroller in the above photo). They gave us plenty of reasons. One of them was there were too many people claiming the Oneness Process was a cult, when in fact the Oneness University states its only intent is supporting the awakening of humanity, not any particular religion. Toward that end they always encouraged each of us to find our own symbol for the Divine be it Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Quan Yin, or whoever or whatever personally spoke to us (for me it turned out to be a horse!).
What we heard that day, was that because of the actions of others in the past, we would be affected in our process. It seemed highly unfair. Our dhasa (I can’t remember her name. I just remember that she HAD been the smiliest of all the dhasas), apologized profusely. She ask us to trust them. That Bhagavan never took anything away without making up for it in some other area in an even bigger way. But she wasn’t budging from her delivered message.
Each of us dealt with the disappointment in a different way. Some people threatened to sue: We were promised certain things, they cried! Some people beseeched for understanding and leniency. One man started a petition which his dhasa promised would be read to Bhagavan, in hopes of a change of heart. What made this announcement even harder to take was that in a week’s time there would be a celebration of Amma’s birthday. We had all pretty much thought we would get to be part of it. Sadly, not so. (Although, we did get birthday cake at dinner the night of her birthday. Whoopee.)
Striving to process it, we broke silence. For me, the devastation I felt was complete. All my life I had felt an inner connection to the Divine, but had no spiritual community in which to share it. Just this once I wanted to sit in the presence of a great spiritual master and be part of a community. I wanted to alieve the aloneness I felt in my spiritual journey. One of the women in my dorm room knew about the changes that were coming to the Oneness Process, including moving it to a Fiji campus for Americans and Australians beginning in 2008. There’s also a focus on joining forces with Tony Robbins to bring the Oneness Process to a more secular type of person. That just seemed completely foreign to me.
But I know how to work through disappoint and process my own emotions with it. My intent was to honor that part of me that was devastated, yet not stop the rest of the process. Meanwhile the group dynamics took a turn for the worse. People fell into distrust. Where before they saw everything in a rosy light (Oneness University can do no wrong), suddenly all they saw were starving dogs, hungry children and misuse of power. Then there were the ones in the group who had to prove they were very enlightened already and were going to accept what was being said in total obedience. And woe to us that voiced our discord. I got to feel the full brunt of it one afternoon in a small group that was meeting with Purnima. No one wanted to talk about the elephant under the rug. So I did. I immediately had several women turn on me and begin insisting that my experience to the announcement should be one of acceptance and to quit being a whiny American (they were from other countries). I don’t tend to talk in terms of nationality, but after the third reference to whiny Americans, who had to go to the big boss because they didn’t like what the dhasa said (in reference to the petition), I had had enough. I said that Americans were intolerant of systems that didn’t work and were unjust AND when pushed too far, we would jump on the ship and throw the tea overboard. Well, that reference drew a few blank looks, but Purnima totally understood what I was referring to and burst out laughing.
Our group now had to find a way to regroup and get back into the Oneness Process. The dhasas decided to help us by creating an unforgettable evening….
Copyright © 2007 gia combs-ramirez. All rights reserved.
Thank you for your wonderful story!