Feeding Your Demons: Practicing Radical Hospitality

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”  –Carl Jung

In my last post I shared my journey of how I stopped fighting my demons and began to feed them.  In this post I’d like to talk about the practice of feeding your demons that I am learning from Tsultrim Allione and show how it is not so un-Christian as one might think.  This is her guide based on the teachings of Machig Labdrön, an 11th century female Buddhist teacher.  I am only summarizing her in depth practice so please refer to her work if you would like to try this.

Step One:  Find the Demon
Take a few deep breaths to calm your body.  Identify a situation or a feeling in your life that troubles you.  Look for the place in your body where you carry the burden of this problem.  Is it in your tight jaw?  In your chest?  In your lower back?  Is it in a place on your body where you self harm?  Does it have a color? A temperature? A smell?  A texture? A sound?

Step Two:  Personify the Demon and Ask What it Needs
In this step imagine what this creature would look like if it was sitting in front of you.  What is the shape? The gender? What is its emotional state?  How big is it?  How do I feel in its presence?  Once you have imagined it sitting across from you, ask it:  What do you want from me?  What do you need from me?  How will you feel if you get what you need?

Step Three:  Become the Demon
Keep your eyes closed and move to the place where you imagined the demon sitting across from you.  Take a few deep breaths as you imagine yourself as this creature and what it feels like to be in its shoes. Then answer the three questions you asked it:  What I want from you is… What I need from you is…When my need is met, I will feel… Tsultrim Allinone writes, “With a disease like cancer the demon might say, ‘I want your life force, all of it.’  And responding to ‘What do you need?’ the demon might say, ‘I need strength.’  And if to the question ‘How will you feel if you get what you need?’  –in this case, strength–the demon replies, ‘I’ll feel powerful,’ then you know to feed the demon power.  Be sure the answer to the third question is a feeling.  For example, the cancer demon might have said, ‘I will feel huge.’  But hugeness is not a feeling… the feeling behind hugeness might be power.”

Here is the paradox:  we may think that feeding a demon makes it grow, but it actually diminishes it’s strength.  By becoming conscious of our demons and the needs behind their pain, they can be soothed and transformed into a helper for us.

Step Four:  Feed the Demon and Meet the Ally
Return to your body and original seat and face the demon again.  Imagine your body melting into a nectar that you can offer the demon.  If it was love, or acceptance the demon wanted imagine what that would look like as your body melts into a bowl or a chalice or whips around the demon like a wind.  Follow your imagination as you offer the gift of your body to the wounded part of yourself.  Take note of the color or consistency   You are giving the demon the feeling it will have when it gets what it needs.  Feed the creature until it is totally satisfied.  At this point the demon may transform or leave.  Ask to meet the ally, to see how this transformed energy might be used for good.  Again use your imagination and take any notes on its appearance and your feelings.  Ask the ally:  How will you help me?  How will you protect me?  What pledge or commitment do you make to me?  How can I gain access to you?  Then change places again and answer the questions as the ally.

Step Five:  Rest in Awareness
This is an important part of integrating the experience into your body.  I like to lie down in shavasana pose.  Let yourself enjoy the lightness and freedom of this experience.

How can this practice be Christian?
Without writing a thesis on the topic, I will outline a general theology that runs throughout the biblical text and Christian tradition.

Old Testament
The Hebrew word “satan” literally means adversary.  When Jacob wrestled with God, God is called the “satan”  in the story.  The Hebrews did not see evil as an external force, but understood the “satan” to be a force within humanity that is inclined toward evil.  Even in the story of Job, the Satan seems to be a part of God’s counsel and works with God to carry out God’s will.  So the overall voice of the Hebrew scriptures lacks our notion of demons and hell.  Later in human development this force is recognized as existing outside of human will (This is introduced in Enochic literature in the 4th Century BCE.)  One of the main components of Old Testament law is the command to care for strangers on the land, windows, orphans and the poor.  Essentially to live in a just community.  This narrative continues in Jesus’ teachings.

New Testament
Jesus is constantly criticized for his extension and reinterpretation of the law as he dines with sinners welcomes outcasts and touches people who are  ritually unclean (read sick and dangerous).  The Gospel of Luke centers on the image of a feast, where all are invited to God’s table to be nourished and recreated.  At the institution of the Last Supper (the most troubled night in the life of Jesus)  Jesus made his body into a nectar, offering it to his friends (to sooth their  future agony) and to remember him.  When Jesus left his disciples he continued to tell them:  go and do likewise–heal the sick, raise the dead.  Essentially, be Christ to others too.

Reconciling the Opposites
American culture especially suffers from a debilitating polarization.  Complexities of self are easily lost in the rigid categories of right or left, republican or democrat, good or evil, conservative or liberal, and with the escaping middle class now we have rich or poor, and so on…  The task before us now is to move from flat polarization of opposites to a reconciliation of them: the paradox.  This makes me think of the tongue twisting gospel of John this week:  I in you and you in me and God in me and you in God, fox in box and sox on fox!  One exercise I do frequently to remind myself when I am projecting my shadow onto others is make a list about everything that annoys me about someone.  Then I put my name at the top and I see that I have given them the worst of myself.

The next level of our human consciousness is to gain the understanding that everything is connected.  Carl Jung taught that what is happening in the global world is also unfolding in our interior lives.  If the earth is wounded, our bodies are scarred.  If we can face our shadows and tend our pain,  we can have compassion enough to heal the world.  The answer to so many of our problems is connection.

“If you’re feeling what the river is feeling, it’s hard to pollute the river. If you are feeling what a child is feeling, it’s hard to rape the child. If you are connected to your own internal being, it is very hard to be screwing and destroying and hurting another human being, because you’ll be feeling what they’re feeling. If you’re separated, it’s not a hard thing to do at all.”
-Eve Ensler

I gave up fighting my demons, and began to feed them

I sat in a cold room under flickering fluorescent lights. I was shaking as two older men placed their hands on my head and commanded the demons leave me in Jesus’ name. “I just saw a hippy demon fly out of you,” said the big guy in his booming preacher voice. They told me all sorts of demons were flying around the room. The other placed a Bible in my lap, “You must read God’s word,” he said. “It’s like a sword that penetrates the darkness.”

“Where?” I flipped through the pages.

“Anywhere,” he said. And so I started reading Leviticus law.

“Try Ephesians,” the other one said after I muttered through the passages about who can have sex with who. He directed me to the verse and chapter. I read:

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. -Ephesians 6:12

The Christian fiction author, Frank Peretti had a major influence on the evangelical and charismatic culture that I was a part of in the late 80s and early 90s. Some Christians even claimed his books, This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness were second only to the Bible and many used them as spiritual warfare handbooks. (Scrolling down on the reviews you can see how much this Christian world view persists today.)

I found myself in Christian communities that prayed more against demons than to God. Ever since I was little, I had been warned about these demons and the portals they use to enter our world: liberalism, new age spirituality, environmentalism, feminism, oh the worst: relativism.

I still remember that awful feeling in my stomach, when I stood in front of my fifth grade class and announced that I would not be attending school on Halloween because it was “The Devil’s Holiday” and we didn’t worship Satan in our family. Even my teacher looked at me with wide eyes and an open mouth. But I had come to expect this sort of judgement. I had been taught that Christians were set apart, fools for Christ.

I was out of grad school when this frightening dualistic world view finally unraveled for me. I listened to a kind psychologist explain (one of those I had been warmed about: the humanistic people under Satan’s spell), he said, “The demons we fear are our own wounded and abandoned parts of ourselves.”

My spiritual journey began to turn in a whole new direction. Instead of escaping my fear–and projecting it onto other people, religions, cultures and worldviews, I began to welcome it. I began to sit with it. I visualized it. I asked it what these fears and awful feelings wanted from me. At first they said: I want your life. I want to consume you. I want to put all my hatred in you. But when I asked them what they needed they said: I need your love. I need your attention. I need your compassion. I witnessed these cut off parts of myself transforming from enemies that once drained all my energy to fight, into allies that empowered me to live a more peaceful creative life.

Shortly thereafter I found myself at a conference on the Divine Feminine at the Washington National Cathedral. I stood in the back of Bethlehem Chapel– green with morning sickness– listening to the first American woman to be ordained as a Tibetan nun. I listened with more than a hundred other people to Tsultrim Allione teach the ancient Buddhist practice of Feeding Your Demons. I fed myself saltine crackers, pregnant with my daughter and my budding feminine spirituality. As I listened I could not help but see how this practice mirrored teachings in the Jewish and Christian traditions too.

Much of the Old Testament law teaches the importance of extreme hospitality towards strangers. Jesus continued this hospitality as he welcomed sinners, outcasts and women to dine with him. In the image of the Good Shepherd, Jesus is portrayed as seeking and feeding the lost. I realized the lost come in many forms: those who have been abused, those who are literally hungry, also those parts of ourselves that we fight against, deny, silence with perfectionism, alcoholism, the ones we starve out, and feed with hatred.

In the mystery of the Eucharist, Christ’s body is given to us. I asked a young girl on Sunday what this could possibly mean. She wisely replied, “It reminds us that we are one with God. That God actually lives inside our bodies.”

Tsultrim Allione taught me that to fight the demons makes them stronger–but to feed them–with the nectar of your very body, satisfies and transforms them.

In my next post I will share the meditation practice that I learned from Tsultrim Allione on how to begin to feed your own demons.

God is not Dead. Religion, Maybe.

Today I want to take on the simple task of redefining religion.

I feel bad for the word, frankly.  It’s become such a dirty word, a creepy complex, instant joy kill.  Many people (in whose company I much enjoy) prefer to wear the “spiritual not religious” name tag at social gatherings.  And I can understand why they want to distance themselves from the trappings of the “r” word.  It’s like hoping your abusive x-boy friend will give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of and more.

Many of us have been hurt by organized religion.  When religion isn’t meaningful, if the symbols no longer function, it dies.  (Thus my entry on Good Friday.)  Many of us have already gotten over that heart break and are not about to pick the scab off.

Nietzsche said God was dead.  But I want to argue otherwise:  Maybe it is the stench of religion that has not yet come out of the tomb.  Christianity is dying in America, despite the fact that most people still confess to believe in God or some Higher Power and are still interested in cultivating a meaningful life and putting their gifts of service into practice in the world.

If our daily and weekly practices–whatever they are–have become merely rituals void of transformation–or worse–kept us living in a grave or from making any connection to the numinous (this could include a bad job or a bad relationship), if our lifestyles leave us lifeless and loveless, if guilt and obligation are all we are getting out of it, then maybe God is not dead after all.  Maybe She’s just opening a farmer’s market down the road but we much prefer our old couch and our diet of frozen microwavables.

After the pity party, I decided not to buy my religion at Wal-Mart anymore.  I didn’t want the easy cheap grace.  I wanted something of quality and substance that didn’t make a profit off of abusing people within the organization.  So I went local, homegrown, organic.

“The Kingdom of God is Within You.”

–The Gospel of Thomas

And the strangest thing happened.  I fell in love with religion again.  I didn’t recognize her at first.  (I had accidentally once mistaken her for a TV evangelist with too much make up.)  She was so much more down to earth.  She led me to ancient practices and taught me new ones.  She became the hand made set of garden tools decorated by my children.  The mocha colored mud boots made of recycled materials.  She’s my favorite overalls, the old button up blue jean shirt.  Religion is the paisley gloves I put on to tend my spiritual garden so my dreams are not left at the cocktail party, but planted in my skin, in my heart and in the world.

Maybe church helps you do this or temple or mosque or yoga studio.  Maybe none of these do.  I hope you find something that does.  For the human journey is one of meaning making.  Spirit and flesh co-mingling, co-creating.  Religion is simply the practices in our lives that help us connect to the Divine. 

Sometimes other people can give us their spiritual tools and they work for us.  Sometimes we have to make our own.   Because our dreams belong in the world.  And when we are dreaming God’s dreams, not even death can stop the beautiful bloom.

So let me try that “r” word again.  Religion.  Your earthy garden garb.  Your greenhouse.  Your sacred texts.  Your yoga mat.  Your confession.  Your meditation.  Your morning cup of Joe.   Your night time bubble bath.  Whatever it is that makes you grow.

I’d love to hear how you are currently connecting with the Divine in your life.  And what you think about the “r” word.

Rising with the Unnamed Woman

I don’t know her name.  But she and I have been called the same.

It’s been over 20 years since it happened to me.  I’m just now experiencing, at age 37, how it feels to transition from surviving to thriving.  I’m not carrying around a big secret anymore.  I wrote a memoir.  I’m not afraid to stand in front of a crowd.  I do it every week.  I am not afraid to speak.  I sing.  It took over ten years of therapy.  I’ve had to work through drug addictions and build self esteem.  I still have my bad days still when something triggers me and I’m fourteen again and the floor opens up beneath my feet and I spiral down the bottomless pit.  Like when I watched the news coverage of Steubenville.

I wanted to die because the whole high school called me a slut.  Because the rapist bragged.  Because I was the new girl and I had no friends.  I cut my wrist.  I didn’t have the national news empathizing with the rapist.  I didn’t have stupid bloggers calling for a whore registry or saying women enjoy being raped.  And so I am reaching out across the internet to tell the young woman that you have my support.

I am saddened that I have not seen the mainstream media report on how rape can effect a woman in her lifetime,  or provided resources, but has shown me instead that rape culture remains alive and well.  I caught myself thinking, “I’m so glad I never said anything at the time.”  (FEMINISTING had one of the most powerful, spot on responses to the verdict and the media’s reaction.  Thank you!)

To the unnamed woman:  I am proud of you for speaking.  For your bravery.  You give me courage.  You are helping us change the world.

Hornets, Weeds, Water, Seeds

image from acelebrationofwomen.org

There is a hornet in the room

and one of us will have to go

out the window into the late

August midafternoon sun.

-James Schuyler

A man stands in front of an audience of teenagers and asks, “How many of you have contemplated suicide?”  It is evident that he is a good speaker and has already won their trust because all of their hands rise into the air.  ”We all do,” he says, “because change is always about something dying.”

When it’s time to change, death comes to us and asks,  ”What needs to die?”  The answer is not our body.  Not our soul.  It’s whatever is holding us back.  It’s the hornet who has to go out the window, not us.

Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
-Fleetwood Mac

Sometimes I don’t know the answers to these questions.  But I try to remind myself that don’t have to know the answers.  Today, all I need to do is sail through the ocean tide of now.  To be present and to breathe.  If I can practice this today, and then again tomorrow, I can stop worrying about the future because I am cultivating a life of peace by tending these seeds.  And someday I’ll have a garden.  And fruit. And maybe some kale too.

So may we be gentle with ourselves today.  Pull the weeds that block the light. And soak in the river of life, the river beneath our feet.  It’s always flowing.  It’s always giving.  The tides may be changing, but we can open our roots, our hands and our windows.  Release the hornet to the wind and receive ourselves again.

God Sightings and Burning Bushes

I was running late again.  The gray sky hung over the day like a blanket.  And the snow, the snow was in no hurry to fall to the ground.  I pressed the gas pedal and checked the clock again.  It looked like the cotton back in Arkansas, in the summer, when the wind made it dance in the air.  My breath was constricted.  My thoughts racing.  I turned on East Tower road, did some quick math and talked myself into accepting the fact that I was going to be at least ten minutes late to my appointment.  And there they were.

I had just told the story of the burning bush to the kids in chapel.  As I was reading the Exodus text verse 3:3-4 jumped off the page, “Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”  When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called out to him.

I had always thought a burning bush would lock anyone’s gaze.  But the text shows us that Moses deliberated and chose to look at the mystery before him. And because he chose, God spoke.

And now that I’m older, I get it.  I used to have more time for the mystery. But now I know how easily it is lost in the rush of life.  Moses could have easily ignored it.  Turned around, muttered to himself, “I’ve got all these sheep to pasture and I’m beyond the wilderness and far from home and the sun is setting and I’m starving and…”

I slowed the car down and turned to gaze at the sight. Twelve, maybe fifteen deer stood on top of the frozen water and along the banks of the stream.  A whole flock of deer. Families, babies and giant daddies perked their ears up and looked at me.  And the snow fell between us. And the wind blew.  And I was 15 minutes late to my meeting. And it was okay. In fact, it was wonderful.

There are many bushes along the roadsides of our lives aflame with sacred mystery. We need only to turn and look. Behold the beauty, the sorrow and the joy, the love and the pain, the whole marvelous mess of everything. Take it all in.  Then listen.

What Wondrous Love is This?

Movie seats at the Capitol Theater in Rome, NY

I was five years old when it happened.  Yes, theologically, God was present at my baptism. And unorthodoxly (if I may create such a word) God never left me, for I am made of stardust, a breathed upon earth creature that rose from the landscape of my mother’s womb.  But I have few memories before language.

God comes to me– or I come to God–not in the light, but in the shadows of the old movie theater that our church rented out on Sunday mornings in Rome, New York.  The people claim Charles Finney as their founding father, the one who came the area and ignited the great revivals from 1824-1832.

I sat in the squeaky movie seats holding my stuffed animals and some crayons, naive to the forces that drew my parents here.  I watched my mother play praise music on the wooden piano that moved on wheels across the stage.  I wondered how she did it so effortlessly, how she mesmerized the worshipers with her angelic voice.   Sometimes my father played guitar with her.  Other times he stood behind the people who went up for prayer. His job was to catch the ones who were slain in the spirit after the preacher puts his hands on top of their heads.  My father laid the spirit-filled people up and down the narrow movie aisles, like sardines squished inside a little tin can.  I watched their unconscious bodies twitch like fish out of water grasping for air.

They called it a second baptism when the people spoke in strange languages I couldn’t understand.  They were the true believers, the closest to God.  They raised up their hands and sang words like a baby babbling.  When they did this, I felt the room grow warm, I heard the music circling around me.

One day, it got so hot I thought I might pass out.  I opened my thirsty mouth and suddenly I began to speak like everyone else.  I didn’t know my heart contained a secret water fountain.  An ocean of joy bubbled up within me.  I lifted up my hands, threw back my head, and sung words I did not understand.  But I knew everything when I was five.  I knew some mysterious love that had made my flesh a home.

I also knew that my mother was afraid of her parents knowing that I had been baptized (again) in a a swimming pool.  I knew my experiences were dangerous.  (Even confusing as my grandparents were the kindest most generous people I knew.)  Still, talking about this love could make the kids on the bus tease you, or make your girl scout troop leader reprimand you,  or make your teachers cast a frightened eye upon you.

I wonder sometimes if this is a divine encounter or merely a human experience that occurs when a potpourri of people and places create just the right moment to unleashes the flood.  The praise band changes key, the singer’s voice cracks with emotion, the lights go down and the hands go up and the tears fall.

Regardless, I realized the other day: I want to feel it. I want to feel my religion.

Of course no one wants to be fooled either.  How do we know when to trust our experience?

Andrew Young, in the PBS series, God in America spoke of the historic tensions between faith and reason, “This is a religious universe. Most people– particularly most educated Americans– get uncomfortable when their emotions and their spirituality get the best of their intellect.  But there are times when the intellect can’t handle it.  The truly religious moments in our civil rights movement didn’t make any intellectual sense.  Nobody in their right mind would do some of the things that we did.  But we did it because we were caught up in a spirit.”

And I have a sense that as much as we intellectually resist it, we want to be caught up in a spirit too, a living one as real as the air that fills our lungs.  One that leads us to the top of a mountain to see the big view of life.  One that knows the story behind our fortified masks and intricate scars.  One that calls us to be our best self–or even better– something more than we could have hoped for or imagined.  And yet we mistake the spirit in the extra drink of alcohol, in the secret affair, in the wings of Icarus.  And then we fear that the spirit wasn’t even there in the first place.

And yet it still breaks into our world.  In the twinkling of a child’s eyes, in the miracle of new life, when someone we love dies.   And the embers burn.  And our hearts yearn again to touch, to taste and to see.

A few years ago I traveled back to Rome, New York to see for myself.  I wanted to know if I could close the book on this one.  Leave it behind in my fundamentalist past.  Chalk it up to smoke and mirrors.  I found the people of Rome Christian Center now gathered in an old Lutheran Church.  I greeted the same pastor who kept calling me Julie because I looked so much like my mother when he knew her so long ago.  I listened to his preaching.  I intellectually dismissed their theology.  I sized up their patriarchy.  And still, I encountered the mystery.

“We want you to get a word from God before you leave,” the pastor told me.  And I prepared for my public reprimand on the evils of feminism and the wide way of Episcopalians, but when the prophet placed his hands on my head I felt it again, as strong as it has ever been, the love in this moment in time, in this strange place, with these strange people, in this strange flesh that had since become a woman, a wife, a mother and a minister.

Out of place and out of time, yet in a place and in a time just the same.  It can catch me off guard.  And yet it is not so very strange at all.  I like to feel it.  It’s like returning home to a place I’ve never fully known, one I will visit from time to time and one day, when the wind blows the dust back to where it came, I shall remain and see who it was that put this wondrous love in me.

–Excerpts from my memoir, “A Girl Called Loma”