What is your standard? and Everything is ‘the walk’
On July 1, 2010, I was following behind a small caravan of cars on the way to June Lake, CA. Leading the pack was my Beloved Guru, Santosha Tantra. She had invited me to spend 5 weeks with her at a retreat house. Various visitors would come and go, and I would be able to spend the entire time with her (because of my job as a teacher, and having the summer off. Yes, lucky me!) Her generosity is incredible.
I was so happy and excited! I was to be her cook for three weeks, and then another person would arrive and take that job over, and I could carry her camera on the hikes for the last 2 weeks. I was very happy to do all of it, and this last job is SO GREAT! because it meant I was going on all the hikes with her from that point on.
Important to know about Santosha for this story is that Santosha loves the earth, loves nature, and loves hiking. She is not mild about it, she is a wild force about it! At the age of 57, she climbed Half Dome in Yosemite, CA, which is a hike over 19 miles. Now she is 58, and in better shape than ever! Hiking with her is nothing less than a rush – a real challenge, and exhilarating!
So, Boot Camp! We arrived there on July 1st, in the afternoon. I had brought a lot of food and loaded up the fridge. I began preparing her food for the next day. I discovered that at the altitude we were at, 7000’, things took longer to cook. I was especially having a hard time getting brown rice to come out right. I still had not figured it out after 3 days, and this brought about the first discussion of ‘standards’ we live by, which was one of the main themes of this trip.
One of these early mornings, Santosha asked for brown rice with a poached egg on top for breakfast. Easy enough, yes? Well, the ego will rear its head at random when the sunlight is shining over the well! While I was poaching the egg, I began to ramble on about my mother and how she cooked these eggs… blah blah blah. (Truth be told, my mother was not a gourmet chef, and I have always thought of myself as a really mediocre cook, so I was randomly rambling and nervous right then.) I gave it to her, and the rice was mushy. Like I said, I had not bothered to really figure out the rice problem yet.
Santosha took the opportunity to begin a consideration with me about “standards”. After teasing me about the eggs and ‘mom’, and snapping me back to where I was and what I needed to accomplish, she told me I should figure out how to make the rice correctly! It’s not hard, you just need to apply yourself to it.
THEN she said, you have a different standard for ‘beading’ than for cooking. (I make jewelry out of beads, and have for 15 years. I love it.) Santosha continued, “I want you to write down your standard for when you are beading, and then your standard for when you are cooking.” I knew this would be telling…
After she left, I sat down and started writing. Beading standard first – I wrote: “I have to love the beads I am working with. Making something for Santosha, it has to come out over a 9 (out of 10) or I won’t give it to her. I’ll fix it or something.” I add later, “I make sure I have everything I need before I start. I have to love the design I am working on, but may alter it to make it better. If I make a mistake, I fix it if possible or just work with it, and if not, I take the thing apart and start again. I am not upset by this, but just want to make it right however that needs to happen!” (I am making these pieces of jewelry for Santosha about 98% of the time.)
Next, cooking standard! First I wrote: “for ME – has to feed me, taste good to me, not make me feel lousy (i.e. too much junk, too many days in a row) – I like good food. For Santosha is different – I try hard to cook it as a recipe says, and make it look good. I have made mistakes…” I began to see how my standard for ME creates the problems when I cook for her.
I realized that whenever I am cooking, if a problem comes up, I go to my standard automatically and do not get into creative problem solving mode (like I do when I’m beading), but just make do with whatever works out. I do not start over again, and I do get nervous and upset. This is so different from beading! Why?! Some silly belief that I have that I cannot cook? But I can! I have been cooking for Santosha once a week for years! And I’m good at following recipes now. But I came to this trip very nervous about it.
Before we left for the trip, she told me, “Drop all ideas, and it will be simple and easy, you’ll see.” She would tell me directly what she wanted, so I wouldn’t have to worry or be concerned about it. It was actually VERY much easier and cleaner, and simpler, and quite wonderful! So when she asked me to write these standards, I was more relaxed already, more ready to really look at it. I could see how the standards I emotionally hold in myself FOR MYSELF are the ones I end up doing, regardless of what I THINK! So, my standard for cooking had to be rethought, and changed! Made higher! And because I was in her company, it did change during the trip. I was able to make things for her and she was fine with it all. I also figured out how to cook rice that very day! (Imagine that….) Not hard to do, I just had to have the standard for myself that I COULD figure it out, and make good rice for her, and for myself!
It’s amazing how simple it really is when Santosha cuts through the emotional garbage that we are living our lives in. She makes it conscious in us, and then shows the other option – which is to use the clarity and intelligence of what we already know, and apply it to each situation that comes. She always is saying that we do the same things day after day after day for a lifetime – why not do it better and better? That is the real way to apply intelligence, and live this life with dignity. This discussion naturally went into all areas. She said we needed to have a real standard in relationship to all aspects of our lives. We need to be clear about what those standards are. Are we happy with them? Do the standards challenge us to grow, do they support our growth as human beings, and do they move us toward a more spiritual life? Are we always growing toward a higher standard for ourselves?
‘What is your standard?’ is the question Santosha would ask over and over. It carried through everything we did, and the higher standard was being lived and demonstrated to us by her, as it always is, in everything she did. That standard of enquiry and passion and ever forward movement is the sign of her life, of everything she does. To live in her company is to see the keen intelligence of her passion and Realization applied to everything she is doing. It is not a small thing – it gives a wide open door to change your behavior, change the emotional and mental and physical patterns we animate if we are willing to GO WITH IT!
I was willing! And so she set me in motion into different patterns than I had been living for quite a while – my ‘giving up’ patterns – to patterns of intelligence, the best ones I know how to live. I had lived better patterns sporadically before, but had abandoned them in the last year, especially.
My year-long tantrum was because, like everyone, I am aging, and I turned 56 this year. I had ‘given up’ on myself (no longer looking like a sexy momma!), and gained 15 pounds, and stopped exercising, and randomly binged on bad food. I didn’t animate caring or discrimination about anything about myself – diet, health, finances, meditation, entertainment … So, you can imagine how I was feeling about myself! The words I heard in my head were ‘no one cares’ and ‘it doesn’t matter’. I gave up as a way of dealing with my freaking out about aging, and let myself go. I was suffering my own childish ‘tantrum’ very much because of my attempt to numb out.
Before the trip, Santosha teased me one day about being pudgy, and did I think I ever wanted to lose the pudge? It is so sweet how she teases you and makes you laugh, and lets you talk about something you never talk about.
And then, to my surprise, on the first day of the trip she said she was going on a diet, and planned to lose 5 pounds during her time there. She said nothing to me directly, but I took it as an opportunity to do that if I wanted to. I said nothing either, but from then I was dieting too, by my choice, to raise my standard with diet. We did not talk about it for almost a week. She noticed I was not indulging in any foods, or eating too much. I was doing the best diet I knew for myself and not ‘fudging’ on it at all. It had been a long time since I had done this. Her diet made it easy for me to do it. She is always giving help like this, an opportunity to grow, and there I was for 5 weeks, so I jumped right on this one!
The next standard pattern that got changed was TV watching, or my entertainment standard. I watched a lot of movies and TV in the past year! So on the second day of our trip, that element came up.
On that day, I got to go on a long hike with her. And I loved it!! We hiked over 9 miles past some gorgeous lakes. The next day we took it very easy. Later that next day we were watching TV, and I was slouching over in the chair like a slug. That was my word for it later…I had collapsed, and was bringing no energy whatsoever to the situation. Because of that, I forgot some of her food for the next day – I was being such a slug in front of the TV! In the morning as I scrambled to get her what she needed food-wise, she said ‘no more TV for you!’ I agreed wholeheartedly, knowing I could not indulge myself in that frame of mind, and still carry on with my service to her. I have always known that I become a dope when I watch TV. I am not sitting there discriminating about what I am seeing, having a conscious process with it. I am a slug, like my mouth is hanging open, duuuhh!! So right then I was happy to stop watching it! I knew I had to.
When she returned from her hike that day, she said to me that she thought it would be better if I didn’t go on the long hikes with them until I was relieved of the cooking service in a couple of weeks. I could come on the shorter ones, but not the really long ones. Wo! That was exactly what I had been thinking during the day, and so I said, Yes! I agree with you totally. So for the remainder of the first 3 weeks, if she was going on a long hike, I was at the house cleaning, cooking, doing what I needed to do with a clear head and conscience, relaxed and happy. I’d go out for short hikes in the neighborhood trails, and be home before they returned. I was so grateful to see how to do the service really well, without stress and worry and fudging and trying to get away with doing as little as possible, or trying to get to go on all the hikes with her. My standard for doing my service was raised a lot, and all the stress was taken out of it at the same time. I see now that they go together – higher standards and less stress!! Amazing
Another standard is meditation. I have never been a successful meditator – obviously, or I’d be Awake by now!! But I had really given up on it, just as I had on everything about improving myself or my life. But now, each night I sat to meditate. Santosha had asked that since we were there with her, she wanted us to meditate every day. The first night I realized I had to stretch again before I sat, so that my body could adapt to it again. So I added my old yoga routine each night to my schedule from the first day, upping my exercise standard too!
Then I sat to meditate. In the mysterious way things happen, on the first night I heard in my head the sentence “I’m here, I’ll just really meditate and not do anything else!” And later, “whenever I’m able to really begin a true spiritual practice, I’ll have really practiced meditating and can begin from there!” So I began to engage it like something I really wanted to learn about, like an art form. This was something new for me, and I’m still working on it, and no doubt will for a long time. But it makes meditation into a process, not something I just cannot do. I just have to keep to this standard.
And then, there is THE HIKE! Santosha has kept herself in TOP physical shape! She works hard at it naturally, and at 58 can leave me in the dust! She is strong and fast and passionate as a hiker. Being on the trail with her is one of my favorite things in the entire world. She moves with such a love of it. She is perfect in how she moves and rests, and drinks and eats, and moves and rests and on and on until we have completed the hike. She loves nature and everything about it so much, it is so happy and exciting to be with her. And her sense of beauty is so developed, the places we end up hiking are exquisite, gorgeous places. Some hikes are easy, some are hard. Quite hard! But I love that physical challenge, and always have (until I ‘gave up’ last year…that’s over!!).
She uses the hike to teach us so much about how to be here in life. “One foot in front of the other” is the main phrase. Be present, not thinking, worrying, planning, complaining internally or externally – just keep walking, one foot in front of the other. Just do it!
Be prepared for the hike. Bring everything you need – the right clothes, shoes, water, food, hiking sticks, bug spray, chap stick, snacks, water, and more water. Rain poncho, band-aides, Plackers, silverware, lunch, right hat! Carry the camera! If we are prepared, that stress is non-existent and we can just do the hike now!
At 10,000 feet, the hikes are incredible! The uphills are a workout on the lungs, gasping for oxygen at that altitude. The muscles strain, but if I put one foot in front of the other, I will make it. I can always trust that Santosha will rest when necessary. She always rests before her body gets really tired, and drinks before she gets really thirsty, and eats before she gets really hungry. That way her body feels nourished, hydrated, and rested for the next push, all the time! She is brilliant at it! So if I am with her, I just work at doing what she does, and trust that. It always works.
Having said that!! On one long hike she DID leave me in the dust! I was walking behind her, and my goal was to KEEP UP! And I was trying to match her stride and stay with her. But at 10,000 plus feet, I began to get rubber legs and had to sit down. She was just cruising along, and I said “I have to sit!” And I gave the camera to Neil. She said “OK, we’ll be at the top eating lunch!” I sat and drank almost ½ a bottle of water (which showed me I had not been drinking enough for myself!!) I got up to go again, and from about 3 switchbacks up she saw me walking and said, “Small steps! Take smaller steps!” and Neil yelled out, “Lean on the sticks!” I followed the advice and was able to get up there a few minutes after they did. I was very shaky though.
I sat and ate lunch, devoured everything in my pack except some crackers. I was still feeling shaky, silently wondering about whether to go on or go back. I said nothing out loud at all about it, but in a few minutes Santosha said, “You’ll be fine, it will be just fine.” Yahoo! That’s all I needed to keep going the next 8 miles downhill with her and everyone. And she was right, it passed and I was normal again – and even better because I was taking small steps whenever we were climbing at all. And I continued to do that for the rest of the trip. It helped me to climb some very steep places, which I thoroughly enjoyed doing!
Later on that same hike, we came to a roaring river about 20 feet across, and one skinny log to cross over it, about 10 feet above the river. It was obvious to me it could not be walked on unless you are so used to doing that kind of thing, like a tightrope walker or something! The narrowness of the log and the noise and movement of the river made it a very dangerous thing to do. So? Santosha sat down on it, and skooched her way across it on her butt. Phew! She had figured out a safe way to go! It was still a little scary, and awkward, but do-able! I did the same thing she did, and so did everyone else. Even the ones I thought might be ‘brave’ or ‘macho’ and try walking it, ended up doing the safe thing. It was a humorous moment for all of us, and Santosha took pictures of it for fun.
Of course, my hiking standard went up on this trip too. Two of us and Santosha walked around Saddlebag Lake, and through to Lake Helen, and then DOWN THE SHALE!! into Lundy Canyon. This shale is a STEEP side of a mountain with almost no trail in it whatsoever, made completely of rocks. They slide down when you step on them, and they are not small, they are big enough to have spaces between them where you can get your foot or leg stuck in there and then you are in trouble! Before we started down, Santosha turned to me and seriously said, “This is a trail where you have to be conscious of EVERY STEP you take. Test every step.” This put me in another mode, thank you!! Santosha went first. I let her go a bit ahead of me since the rocks were randomly sliding downhill wherever we stepped and I did not want them to land on her! In fact, in the first minute, one of the rocks I stepped on DID roll down to her and stopped on her leg. She did not say whether it hurt or not, but from then on I let her go much farther ahead of me, and was even more careful of what I was doing. I followed her lead most of the time. When she is being careful, it is in every move and motion her body makes. It helped me so much to stop and watch her every couple of minutes. I think we went down for a long time, but at the bottom she yelled out and shook her fist at the ‘slide”.
We made it! What an exciting adventure, challenging and a bit dangerous! What followed were fields of wildflowers, mountain streams and ponds – sheer beauty and delight. I said, “Can there be any more excitement in one day?”
Another day, Santosha and I were going to do a previously unknown hike, which is a fun adventure – Santosha loves to discover a new place. During the drive to the trail, I was driving and the sun was in my eyes from the side window. I was moving my arm around to try to block it, and was getting agitated. Santosha turned to me and simply said, “Just make peace with it.” I felt my state and just relaxed, and suddenly there was no problem with the sun at all. I turned to her and she gave me a little smile, and we continued driving.
We hiked the Parker Lake parking lot to Silver Lake. We ended up hiking up steep hills for 2 ½ hours. At one point Santosha said, “Do you still have hope?” I said, “Nope! I let it go!” She was referring to the hope I was carrying that the uphill would end soon! She talked about holding a psychological barrier in our mind toward something, and how that effectively will STOP people from accomplishing something they certainly COULD accomplish otherwise. But we set up a line, an imaginary stopping place in our minds, where we will refuse to go any further. This is our downfall! If we, instead, do NOT DO THAT, but just put ‘one foot in front of the other’, we can complete the task at hand. It may be difficult, or much easier than you imagined, but it CAN be completed, and you will feel WONDERFUL when it is completed. Satisfied! and amazed that you did it, when you did not know if you could or not.
And the beauty of that trail we were on was SO great! When we got to a high plateau, we were walking nearer to the face of one of those BIG craggy mountains, all rock and texture and color – and it was awesome. Then we crossed the plateau for a while. We ran into a line of people on horses, come up from the Silver Lake area. The lead rider looked baffled and asked us, “Where did you come from?” Santosha answered, “Parker Lake.” She went, ‘Wo…”. She knew the terrain, I guess! As we walked on, we came across pockets of beautiful wildflowers. Santosha was taking photos. She said something like, “You feel so a part of everything, you can’t even name it – it’s all just consciousness, all the same thing.” Later on I had to say, “This is the most perfect life, if it could ever be.” She said yes.
Her total enjoyment of adventure was shown when she and Crag returned from an off-road experience they had tried. They are both novices at it, and it ended up to be a 21 mile ride, way more than either would have imagined. They were laughing so much, and Santosha was hilariously telling the story of the ride for a long time. It still brings hilarity and joy to ask about it or mention it – they had to completely go with it, and keep going until it was over. “One foot in front of the other.” And they loved it!
Another standard that was ‘upped’ was my treatment of others. Santosha has always worked on this with us all! Our standard around her is higher, by necessity, but we slip out of it in front of her, of course, since we do not keep the same standard all the time! Lesson is sinking in here…
On two occasions I made some casual, less than kind response to someone, and she called me on it. Someone else teased me about one of my comments also, so I saw myself being mean! I did not want to do that, it’s hurtful for no reason at all! So I worked at being just present with everyone, and not playing games. On another day Santosha said to me that she sees that sometimes we get mixed up – how she teases and talks to her devotees is one thing. She has only our growth in mind in every moment of our relationship – I know this is certainly true. But we may talk to someone in a way that seems to us like something she might say, but we are in a game with it, a mean-spirited game that is not caring, much less concerned with helping the person out in the moment with their growth.
It is good to be caught in the act, because in her company, I can feel my intent and the result, and it is painful and callous, and not humble in the slightest! That is not how I want to be. She is always “cleaning” me up when I am with her. She does it so that she can have a good time! And so can I, because of her help!
She always says that “life” is here to teach you to be humble. NO experience, no matter WHAT it is, will make us happy like we imagine it will – forever, permanently. Life is not here to make us happy. Life is here to teach us to be humble.
Santosha says that there is no ‘special one’ ; there is no “one” at all! Our lifetime of trying to become and be recognized as that ‘special one’ is the scenario for all our suffering. That is the basic idea for me – we are fiercely seeking something that does not exist! Over time this “special me” is not made permanently happy by anything. So we start indulging in any pleasure we can find. And that is our life – numbing out in small pleasures day to day, being angry and crabby about the way life doesn’t work out like we WANT it to! And still, most of us never ask any real questions about it!
Santosha talked about this a lot on the trip, as she always does in some form or another – this is the most basic lesson she is trying to help us to face. She has tried for SO LONG, and we are all getting old now! Can’t I see that there is only the ordinary life here, just as it is happening day to day? What is my standard in life, just as it is? Good question!
I saw a lot about how egos operate – in myself, and in listening to Santosha helping others. One thing in particular is the tendency we have to either dominate, or to be dominated (and then rebel later). I tend to be the one who lets others dominate, and after a while I get really punky with them. This is an endless cycle in my life so far! I have not seen it enough to stop it yet, although after Boot Camp, I am planning to have it stop!
Santosha is so funny in dramatizing our ‘act’ sometimes. This time she was imitating me by being Edith Bunker on All In The Family. Edith is coming toward Archie, all shaky and consoling and seemingly weak, saying, ‘Archie! …Archie!” It is such a perfect scene of that being acted out. She said, and it’s true, that I always allow people to dominate me. I release my own self-responsiveness, release responsibility for myself and my actions and choices. I let someone else do it and so act weak, and stupid, like Edith seems to be doing with Archie. In that serious moment, Santosha imitates Edith, and I can laugh my head off at it, and accept it as a pattern I certainly know I animate, and yet I know I can change.
She talked about how people take on more and more work, and allow it to overtake their lives; that I don’t do things I really want to do because I do not have the time any more to do them. I have chosen to become a slave of the dominant one or thing (like my job), and have stopped deciding what to do myself, and be responsible for my life. I’m choosing to allow someone or some situation to dictate what I do, rather than do what I want to do. And then I blame them!!
It’s all childish. That is the being dominated GAME. It never turns out well for me, either. The dominator never respects me, and I gain no self-respect. When I eventually get mad and punky about it, they are shocked, like it’s out of the blue – I’ve been fine until then! AND I live with a sense of shame that I am not living up to what I KNOW about life, and start numbing myself out with stupid pleasures – a slow self-destruct. BUT!! I can, at any moment, completely decide what it is I am going to do. Then I have more energy, more clarity, more capacity to relate to everyone without GAMES! I really want to work this out in myself, it seems so obvious and simple now. That’s what being with Santosha does!
On our last full day there, Santosha talked about CONCEIT, another thing that stops us in our growth. We believe we are deserving of all things because of our conceit. We think we are better than everyone, the ‘special one’ because of it. It is all false!
What makes this conceit in us? Why do the most ordinary people in the world think they are so hot? (That’s most of us!) For those of us with Santosha, we insert ourselves into HER experience, and we try to OWN it. This brings incredible conceit in us, about nothing!!! It is not our experience, it is hers! We do not KNOW it, we have not experienced it at all! She has! She is Awake! We are just conceited for being with her – like WE are the special ones. We are not, we are ordinary. And she is not conceited in any way. There is no separate one there to BE conceited! It has no place in her. She is free of it, free altogether.
These tendencies are not personal. I don’t have to take it personally that I do this. It is a pattern, and can be seen and changed. I have to make my own standards and live by them, no matter what. If a dominating type of person comes around, I have to live my own standard, and that’s all. There is no dominating that can be done if I live my own standards. There is no confrontation in it. It is a real freedom. If I live the standards Santosha showed me during this trip, I will have a life of another kind altogether, and I know it. And I know it is not hard, that I can do it. It is just my own responsibility to choose it, to live these standards.
Santosha asked me before we left, “So, Scrafford! Do you feel 100% better about yourself now?” I said, “YES!!” Do you feel stronger and happier with yourself? “Yes, thank you so much, Santosha!”
THE END
