FOLLOW THE SWEETNESS

This morning I dreamed I was due to give a talk on ethics at a Buddhist event. Everything about it was messy, and try as I might I could not bring any order to it. I was running around looking for a text to research from, no-one would help me, I couldn’t find my room at a hotel, I didn’t have any shoes….. In my Buddhist days, which finished 20 years ago, one gave ‘talks’. And they were ordered things, with a little bit of room for spontaneity. 

Shamanism, at least what I encountered in 1996, had a very different spirit, and I drank it up. The particular bunch of people I was around had a sizeable authoritarian shadow around its spontaneity. So I took the teaching and ran! Which is what I have often recommended subsequently. Once you have ongoing groups with teachers, there will be shadow stuff, it is inevitable, don’t be disappointed. There is great teaching in that, and it is a great leveller. Sometimes it is manageable, sometimes it is best just to get the hell out. And sometimes we stay and lose a part of ourselves and then maybe years later we leave and find it, never to be lost again. There is great teaching in that too.

I was in a sweatlodge a few weeks ago, and we were having an extra round at the end when most people had left, and in which we took turns to pour a round and say a few things. And part of me, all these years later, still gets in Buddhist mode and anxious about not doing it ‘right’. Now there’s nothing wrong with a bit of planning, but keep it rooted in experience. That is the mystical path. Religion teaches from books; the mystical, esoteric path talks from experience. Esoteric means inner.

                                                    
 

So I reflected on the bees that had made their presence strongly felt at the start of the sweat, flying in and out of the lodge. And I talked about them. That is how shamanic teaching, at its best, works. You trust in what is actually happening, and bring your attention to that, and respond to that. Bees, as Eric Maddern (a seasoned practitioner of the spontaneous path) once pointed out, know their way home. They fly all over, huge distances for such a tiny being, but they know how to get back. And this is a great teaching for a sweat, because the steam and heat a melt us out of all our ideas about our lives and what we think we should be doing, and back to who we always were in our hearts, if only we can trust it. 

We can spend so many years trying to be a ‘better’ person, and ‘working’ on the bits of ourselves we disapprove of, and maybe proud of how hard we 'work' on ourselves. And then one day we realise there was never anywhere to go, nothing to disapprove of, only ourselves just to be with and be close to. And then we have ‘arrived’ and we have something to say.

And the bees of course collect nectar which is turned into honey, which is sweet. And life has its sweetness. And maybe that is how the bees find their way home, by following the sweetness! And maybe that is the best way to live: not by doing what we ‘should’ do – the ethics of my dream-talk – but by following that which makes life feel sweet.  

Many of us are afraid of bees, because they can sting. And one guy in the sweat was not afraid, and picked the bee off someone else and gently carried it out of the lodge. 

As Marianne Williamson said:  "It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”

We are right to be afraid, if we want to hang on to what we know and who we think we are. All that IS our life, it seems, and what could be more terrifying than losing everything we know? But it is only apparently terrifying. The sweat, and the bees, teach us the sweet way home. Pay attention to that which is sweet and live it, and it will lead you, step by step, all the way home. And be ruthless with that which is not sweet, or no longer so!