​… every step you take with mindfulness changes that condition & all experiences related to it.

In the Buddhist world, we talk a lot about the concept of Dependent Origination, which can be summed up in short as the understanding that everything in life comes from something. Just as in Newton’s Second Law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, everything we experience in life is built upon the foundation of experience is leading up to each moment. Every victory, every defeat, every consequence leads you to where you are now. In the physical sense, your exercise, habits influence how well rested you are, how fit your body is, and how content you feel from moment to moment. Likewise, the same occurs in your mind.

Each experience, the way that these situations are parsed & the memories we choose to hold onto influence our every thought, action and response.

If our body is a series of muscles that can be well trained to withstand and endure physically taxing events, so too can our minds. Just as the body can learn how to do a push-up properly, we can train our consciousness to see things differently, and to experience the world differently by extension.

This is one of the inherent truths behind emotional, non-avoidance training, behind shadow work and trauma work & even behind spiritual training. Each of these experiences and the intentional development of awareness around them becomes a tool kit by which you change the way that you approach the world & thus modify how the world responds to you.

I sometimes see people communicate that they are somehow stuck in their ways as though there’s no way for them to change beyond their script, and yet it’s been my experience that this is untrue. We can absolutely learn to live more satisfying, complete, fulfilling lives!

If that was something offered to you, would you desire it? If that was offered to you, would you change your circumstances to change your fate?

I had some particularly intense emotional and spiritual experiences this past weekend, and it began to shift substantially my perspective yet again.

One of the realizations I’ve walked away from the weekend with is this understanding that so much of what we experience is a reflection of what we’ve been conditioned to believe. If we’ve been blessed to live a happy childhood with support and positive experiences of safety, we come to expect that in life, and if we’re lucky, we come into adulthood with better tools for handling hardship. If, however, we have come up in a difficult childhood, very often we come into the adult world with a certain industrious and self-reliance informed by trauma & the various rigors experienced before we were old enough to really handle or conceptualize those experiences.

Neither is superior, and while we might wish for one or the other (often with a great preference for a happier childhood, for instance) these are simply -different- experiences. Without prescribing moral or ethical values to those experiences, we can reflect upon them and come to better understand our current status quo within our minds & hearts, and that is the purpose of this discussion.

What we experience in childhood informs our perspectives in adulthood, and each prior set of life lessons forms a chain of consequences that are motivated by these bits of conditioning we’ve encountered along the way. We learn tools and coping strategies along the way that then influence how we look at every life experience we encounter has an adult, and those experiences can and do contribute to happy or miserable life individual journeys.

You are absolutely a reflection of the landscape of evolutions shown in the mirror of your past, and it’s from the space of understanding that we can begin to affect change in our future.

Blessings,
-Chris

​Earlier today, I spent some time working with a specific aspect of  Ha Shem to assist a client in moving beyond a circumstance in which he slipped & stumbled. He and I are working together with an aspect of the Divine to help him to step beyond momentary misunderstandings and miscommunications that he might be more successful with his wife, and in that moment of conjuration, I felt I understood something more.

So much of what we encounter when we work with the Divine is what we understand as Mercy, and its a different kind of Mercy than to which we are accustomed. 

When the Divine steps in, They (which I use carefully, as Ha-Shem is a plurality just as Elohim is) are an extension of what is effectively Right Action made manifest. They're each subsets of a more complicated series of cosmic motions that then culminate into the Expression of Purpose that magick is. Working with magickal current is a toolkit, and that Divinity can be enhanced or misplaced.

This can feel disastrous, it can feel right, it can feel like a mixed blessing, and so much of it comes down to how we take it. When we believe we're right and concrete in our ways, we often turn a blind eye to how else we might grow and evolve. We mistake our current placement for the Pinnacle, when in fact the Divine movers and shakers that allow us to locate and embrace such things require internal change as a catalyst for growth.

So I say to you: embrace change. Embrace shifting sands, as its the grit of those individual grains acting as an abrasive mechanism which defines and refines us into the shape we wish (and need) to become. It might not make much sense at all, at first, but it will in time. Such is the way of things.

Signed: a person constantly mystified by the Divine Creator and how these myriad manifestations make a mockery of what we've planned.

Remember, "Man plans, God laughs".

​… and the peculiarities of Dharma. 


Spirits are a wild bunch, and they often approach and teach in ways that we don’t expect.

Some years ago, I was attracted to Vajrayana Buddhism after growing up in Nichiren Buddhist circles & over time that attraction transformed into a passionate fervor for the development of the Self through the use of those tools for personal evolution. Along my journey, I met spirits who insisted that I would find my way back to my ancestral practices through a deep dive into the currents of both contemporary and pre-Buddhist Tibetan practices.

Naturally, I was skeptical, as my family hails from Japan on my mother’s side & the pre-Meiji Restoration era practices or my ancestors were all but obliterated within the changing tides of time. Old practices gateway to new ones as Western colonialist mindsets took hold and the ways of the Onmyoji, the Shinto & the Shingon again to largely fall out of favor.

When I began this process of intense spiritual practice, I had no idea just how intimately related these practices were to what we still see in Vajrayana schools today, and I was reasonably baffled at the thought that the practices of the Bonpo would have any kind of bearing on what had been lost to the sands of time within a vastly different social and economic structure of a completely different country…. Yet I was given every reason to trust my spirits, and they have a paid that trust in heaping bounties of growth and spiritual learning I thought utterly lost to the crushing weight of progress. 

Along the way, I (re)learned that Spirit owns these practices & that nothing is truly lost if the spiritual gatekeepers, guardians and teachers of those systems still exist. I’ve learned that those things are really only obscured by time and circumstance. 

With a careful hand and steady heart, one can piece together the practices of Old and find one’s way back to the path once hidden.

As luck and the steadfast guidance of Spirit would have it, I’ve found that my discarnate spirit teachers were truly and entirely correct - I *would* eventually find my way back to my Self & my Heritage as a mixed-race Japanese child of a once-outlawed dynasty of spiritual practitioners. That has been an incredible gift, and I’ve been shocked, amazed and deeply moved by just how right these spirits were. 

You see, Shingon Buddhism is functionally Japanese Vajrayana, and the spirits thereof have already been my constant companions on this journey. Practices that have taken 13 years to ripen have fit nicely within and sparked-alive ritual process kept in secret and the empowerments my family once held still hold trust today. These spirits my tribe was murdered for worshipping and working with still speak, and they still stand beside me despite the brutalities of the Western world. They speak, they listen, and they cause great change for me while endlessly fascinating me at just how much common ground exists.

The path may twist & wind, but for the brave souls who spend decades steeped in these mysteries, it always leads home. I was once beyond hope in considering that I might come to better understand my ancestors, who came before, and yet I feel perfectly at home through the teaching and guidance of Yamantaka, Tara-Ma, Sengdongma, Padmasambhava, Vajrakilaya,  Ksitigarbha & the endless host of Dakinis, Yidams, Dharmapala, and the assembled Dharmakaya. I have found exactly what I was promised, and I am humbled, delighted, scene and found. 

Once dispossessed, I have a spiritual home again, and it’s not just something that I created for myself. It was something that already existed that I needed to tap into, and now I do so as a child of my spiritual ancestry, who has spent years working with angels, demons, yakshas, astrological luminaries, land spirits and everything between. I have the opportunity to straddle and unite these disperate worlds in me, and I feel so, so blessed!

So please, do trust in Spirit. These paths might not make a lot of sense initially, but there’s a reason they exist, and there’s a reason that we are led back to them. I feel tremendous joy out of what once was a desperate sadness and feeling of oppressive isolation as a young child and adult. 

This path may twist and turn, and yet following it diligently, has proven again and again to be the strongest, most promising way forward.

As I go for refuge to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, I invite you to go to Spirit for refuge in your ancestral paths. Strike a light and say hello!

Be blessed. 
-Chris