Debra Basham

Living and Loving

Tag: Barbara Brodksy

  • Connecting the Dots

    Can you see the holiness in those things you take for granted – a paved road or a washing machine? If you concentrate on finding what is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.

    ~ Rabbi Harold Kushner

    Training has brought to awareness profound truth that the presenting problem is not the problem. We are, in mindfulness, continuously reminded not to take our problems personally. Everything is connected. Emotions are generated from “past similars” because emotions are stored in our bodies, however, the most powerful triggers are almost (if not always) outside of our current conscious awareness.

    The following is my journal entry on March 7, 2025 after a night of sleeplessness:

      Most of us are aware of the idea that someone cannot see something until they see it. Matthew 13:13 says it this way, “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand”. I have consciously been working to unwrap an emotional knot for the past several years. The triggers have become more and more amplified.

      This morning early as the mist scooted across the surface of the water after several days of fierce winds, I could see!

      I had the sense the onset had to do with a friend’s stress with her adult daughter who had undergone childhood trauma, but it was too nebulous and did not seem to fit with my friend when I shared my sense about it with her. It has taken a lot of time with the triggers getting more intense to gain baby steps of understanding. One of the most significant insights occurred in January when I realized I had held her responsible for things she had not done.

      This morning’s additional insight might just have set us all free.

      I had blamed her for not seeing what someone else had done, and continued to do even after I had asked him not to. But the pain and now the freedom within the precious insight was never about either of them, it was about my own childhood trauma!

    Immediately after writing I spent almost an hour of precious tearful sharing with my sister about all of this. It comes as no real surprise that she had been awake since 2:30 am — thinking about childhood sexual abuse!

    We know our older sister was sexually initiated by an uncle when she was preteen. We talked about not our not knowing consciously of a sexual initiation experience, we know we were both sexually aware very young. Many years ago when Janis was seeing a therapist we learned it is common for siblings who are secondary or indirect victims of sexual abuse to have emotional reactions. These can include anger at the parent for not being able to protect the sibling, as well as anxiety and helplessness and the urge to control events, and/or fear about the future.

    Our older sister’s death about 5 weeks ago was quite likely a significant catalyst. In infinite gratitude for all of this to finally come forward in awareness for release.

    I had opportunity to share some of it with a friend who is currently navigating strong triggers in her own home. At the end of our Zoom call I emailed her my journal entry along with an audio recording of Tricia Barker leading a release of deep soul wounds and reclaiming your power. This piece is for clearing wounds of rejection, abandonment, betrayal, and even injustice that can be powerful imprints, not just from this lifetime but from past ones as well. I had listened to it the day previous to my insight.

    This morning I am listening to a radio broadcast with Barbara Brodsky speaking on how we awaken. Barbara says first you have to acknowledge it is happening and it is unpleasant, scary. Next, you have to have compassion for yourself and the other/s to see, literally, how anger and fear and separation arise. You have to see that they have no solid substance, and that if you do not have compassion for yourself, you cannot hear the other.

    After having received what I emailed to her, my dear friend sent a text message, “It has been a while since I have connected dots like this about my life experiences. I feel so free and connected.”

    Interestingly I had written in my March 7 journal entry how that morning’s insight might just have set us all free….

    May all beings come to the end of suffering.

  • A Beautiful World Within

    The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within. ~ Ruby Dee

    Last evening I went to a drumming at the home of some long-time friends. One of the other drummers was also a blast from my past. But, the delight of my heart was a young man who had the beauty of curiosity and seeking. Lots of sharing ended an evening significantly warmer than the weather. This morning I sent along information about Adyashanti and Rupert Sprira and a few quotations they might appreciate. I am obviously still under the influence of the 8-day retreat and grateful.

    Hearing Rupert Spira telling a questioner that “the contemplation that we do in the yoga meditations would be the first step. The next step is out in the world. That is obviously more active than just contemplating the objective content of our experience. But In theory there’s no reason why it should feel any different from meditating in your chair. Really, everyday life should be considered an advanced to yoga meditation.”

    On the retreat John Orr spoke of the horizontal or linear path which puts more emphasis on the conditioned realm, and the vertical path which puts more emphasis on non-striving, and the intersection of these two paths. The vertical path does not negate the movement of mind and the nature of the conditioned realm where one thing leads to another. As Rupert Spira says in The Inward and Outward-Facing Paths of Non-duality, “It is either meditation with your eyes closed or meditation with your eyes open. Those are the only two options.”

    My eyes were certainly closed and open a LOT during the retreat. So was my heart.

    For example, when I could hear my host in the room next to the apartment where I was and I noticed the slight contraction in my lower abdomen I was also aware I was having cellular memory from the past lifetime when I was pregnant with the soul that is/was my business partner in this lifetime. Throughout the week I was experiencing this looping back and forth of then and now, here and there, same and not same. And remembering to simply inquire of myself, “Is anything other than?”

    On Monday after I got home from the retreat John and Stacey and I visited our previous home on Lincoln Avenue. The new owners are the daughter and son-in-law of our neighbors. They have done MAJOR renovations. They moved the basement stairs and turned Stacey’s former bedroom into a walk-in closet with in-room-laundry. They added an out door pavilion. Saying all of this I have not even hinted at the magnitude of the changes.

    It was spooky to see how many of the things we had actually contemplated doing at some point during the 40 years we lived there. They put a sliding glass door out of the kitchen; they turned the former formal living room into a dining room; they put in a huge kitchen island.

    As I walked through room after room I could feel the sameness and the difference. “I love the changes you made and I love that you also recognized and preserved the essence of the house.” Wow, that is the intersection of the linear (horizontal) and vertical paths…. It is like living in these bodies knowing they are temporary without denying birth is not the beginning and death is not the end.

    I mentioned having a strong sensation of my week as a Bardo preview. Bardo is the Tibetan term for the intermediate state or gap we experience when we leave this physical body. Most teachers see that cultural differences and personal idiosyncrasies generate a variety of experiences, with a common theme of some fort of life review. We have an opportunity to integrate our learning and balance any unfinished business or unwholesome karma. Medical evidence suggests this is a result of the brain firing as it is going off line.

    What truly excites me is the option to open our heart and mind to see it is a beautiful world as we walk this path while we still have these bodies. Awareness is the key.

    Some people go to the dentist in fear and dread every time. As I key these words in I am developing awareness that this is my path beyond fear of medical things. I know fully that the anxiety had its origin in my mother’s central nervous system while I was in her womb and she was filled with rage, sadness,feelings of betrayal, concern, embarrassment, and fear. Many of my readers know my birth story. My mother discovered she was pregnant and that she had syphilis at the same time. Both were a gift from my father…. Then having been diagnosed with and treated for polio at age five resulted in lots of trauma.

    While that was then and this is now, “now” and “then” do not actually exist independently, they exist interdependently. The beauty is your eyes and heart being open enough to see. Following the retreat, I sent the YouTube video of Les Crane singing Desiderata to my dharma sister co-hosting the retreat.

    You are a child of the universe.
    No less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here.
    And whether or not it is clear to you,No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
    Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive him to be.
    And whatever your labors and aspirations,
    in the noisy confusion of life,
    Keep peace with your soul.
    With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
    it is still a beautiful world.

    Desiderata: Les Crane

    Yes, it is a very beautiful world within and without….

  • Dear Heart

    Several times yesterday I felt great sadness and compassion for my body. This is likely the result of talking to my primary doctor about what I observe related to blood pressure and heart rate. She said the medications are not causing the things I am observing, so it makes her wonder about my heart. I am already scheduled to have a Coronary Artery Calcium Score test done next week.

    The feelings of sadness and compassion for my body are like one would feel for “another” person. Awareness of all that my body has endured, plus a desire to care for it, fills me with great love.

    The “Voice” assures me my heart is healthy.

    The same “Voice” said it has assured me I was done with melanoma, and that has been the case.

    At 2:00 am I received an email from a woman in our dharma study group. She is in her last trimester of pregnancy and she and her husband, their toddler son, and her parents are all ill with Covid. Two of Barbara Brodsky’s sons have tested positive and are quite ill. Another of my dharma buddies is also navigating.

    I pick up crayons and a pen and begin to draw and write.

    I draw a four-chambered heart, as observed in The Four-Fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer, and Visionary, by Angeles Arrien. Arrien is a cross-cultural anthropologist. She is a leading expert on native spirituality and shamanism. In The Four-Fold Way, she reveals the four archetypal principles of the Native American medicine wheel and how they can lead us to a higher spirituality and a better world.

    Flowers spring up and I write a haiku (poem).

    A Heart Haiku
    Be strong, my dear heart
    Be clear, like the open sky
    Be full, like the moon

    Opening can hurt
    But being closed is not life
    Break open, my dear heart

    I write about beating. Beating all the odds. And that a heart breaks in only one direction: open. I write a an acrostic poem, in which the first letter (or syllable, or word) of each line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word or message.

    O – Only
    P – Perfection
    E – Exists
    N – Now

    I write a letter to my own physical heart.

    Dear Heart,

    I’ve taken you for granted most of my life. Please feel my gratitude for your constant beating — for moving blood through my body. For keeping time.

    This day I pray for all hearts to awaken.

    This day may all hearts be strong, clear, open and full.

    May the heart of my body and the heart of this planet beat in harmony that all beings come to the end of suffering.

    May all beings know peace.

    Love, Debra

      In a sutra called The Arrow, the Buddha gives a simile. He says arising anger or frustration feels like getting hit with an arrow. It hurts. Tension, pain. If you get hit with an arrow, will you be kind to yourself for being hit with an arrow? As soon as the thought comes up, ‘I shouldn’t have been hit by the arrow. Maybe I wasn’t careful. Why did this happen to me? Something’s wrong with me. I hate this.’ it’s just like getting hit with a second arrow. The first arrow was painful enough. The first arrow you couldn’t avoid, you didn’t see it coming. The second arrow you’re responsible for. And yet to say, ‘I’m responsible, so I am bad and I have to fix it,’ is just a third arrow.

      ~ Daily Quote by Aaron

  • Outside of the Lines

    “If a wild animal like a cheetah
    can be tamed into forgetting her power,
    forgetting her majesty,
    forgetting her wild —
    then so can a woman.”

    ~ Glennon Doyle Melton

    I watched an interview in which Glennon Doyle Melton reported an experience of going to the zoo and watching the “cheetah run” with her children. She describes a zookeeper coming out with a dog on a leash and saying this dog has been a companion of the cheetah and allowed them to train the cheetah. The dog ran the race, chasing a “dirty pink bunny” behind a vehicle. The the cheetah did the same thing.

    Inside her very body, mind, and spirit, she recognized the way we (women AND men) have been trained.

    It is difficult for me to separate my hearing Glennon’s words from other current conditions.

    I write to a friend:

    His kids are moving him to a memory care facility in Tennessee. I finally see what about that pisses me off. Moving him to a facility so they can watch him like an animal in a zoo. Not moving him into their home and making the commitment to care for his needs as one would care for a newborn baby.

    He is not doing any of the things that make this option out of the question. He doesn’t run. He doesn’t fight. He simply forgets whether he has eaten or is hungry; whether or not he has showered or shaved or gone to the bathroom.

    Mind you, I do not pretend to know what is best for him. My reaction is not about what is happening to him. It is about what is happening within me.

    I can feel some life-calling brewing. Like my dreams upon waking, I have insufficient recall of the details.

    Everything is related to everything. Reading Glennon’s book, “Love Warrior: A Memoir” and taking notes:

      Love Warrior: A Memoir
      By Glennon Doyle Melton

      (p. 144)
      I’m trying to fix my pain with certainty, as if I’m one right choice away from relief. I’m stuck in anxiety quicksand: The harder I try to climb my way out, the lower I sink. The only way to survive is to make no sudden movements, to get comfortable with discomfort, and to find peace without answers… There is only one strategy I can count on during this time: Just do the next right thing. One thing at a time.

      I can never glimpse the end of the path, but if I squint hard, I can see the next step.

      I say: Give me today my daily bread. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but today, give me enough energy and wisdom and strength and peace to handle what comes…. Help me ignore the big decisions, which will make themselves, and just help me focus on the small ones.
      ~~~~~~~

      (p. 195)
      My spiral staircase of progress means that my pain will be both behind me and in front of me, every damn day. I’ll never be “over it,” but I vow to be stronger each time I face it. Maybe the pain won’t change, but I will. I keep climbing.
      ~~~~~

      (p. 203)
      Our pain is not the poison; the lies about the pain are….

      Along the way, we’ve internalized the lies: You are supposed to be happy all the time. Everybody else is! Avoid the pain! You don’t need it, it’s not meant for you. Just push this button. Finally, I was being quiet and still enough to hear the truth: You are not supposed to be happy all the time. Life hurts and it’s hard. Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because it hurts for everybody. Don’t avoid the pain. You need it. It’s meant for you. Be still with it, let it calm, let it go, let it leave you with the fuel you’ll burn to get your work done on this earth.

    The threads are witnessed from a safe distance. The right religion. The right treatment. The right partner. As though there is such a thing. We try to find the truth about the tooth fairy by putting our teeth under our pillow. The lies must been brought into the light. Yes, the tooth is gone and there is a quarter (OK, too cheap for today…. there is a dollar) under my pillow, but that has nothing to do with the truth.

    On Easter Sunday morning I watched the replay of an April 5 IANDS interview “Overcoming The Challenges and Discovering the Gifts of Spiritual Experiences” with Dr. Nicole Gruel. I so relate to her saying that the top risk of NOTES (Non-Ordinary Transcendent Experiences) is the relationship loss as others (and we ourselves) cannot accept awarenesses of the larger reality accessed by our experience.

    I did not go out of my way to notice that dead people talk to us.

    I would never have gone.

    Nor did I willingly leave the safety of the cocoon of Christianity to recognize the SOURCE of all life is “present within” each religion, but not “contained within” it.

    I would never have gone.

    If I had known learning Healing Touch would drive me into decades of despair dancing with the egotism of allopathic medicine, I NEVER WOULD HAVE GONE.

    Something changes when you are opened to the reality of the ever-perfect within the ever-imperfect. Everything changes when you stop searching for the RIGHT choice about anything and let your inner radiance see the light that shines brightly upon a path to everything.

    Later in the day I also tuned in to the Deep Spring Center for Meditation Easter Sunday gathering where Barbara Brodsky and Colette Simone took turns channeling Jeshua and Mary. I made few notes but the notes I did make are significant: The point is not to get through the incarnation, but to consecrate the incarnation. Aware of where we would not have been open to the heart, now we are able to. WOW. We are doing it.

    Glennon said it this way: My spiral staircase of progress means that my pain will be both behind me and in front of me, every damn day. I’ll never be “over it,” but I vow to be stronger each time I face it. Maybe the pain won’t change, but I will. I keep climbing.

    It pisses me off that his family does not know him well enough to draw out of his decaying brain things that he still knows. That he will be in a sea of strangers ignorant of the truth of him as a brilliant university professor who assisted so many on the path of learning. That someone will give him chocolate chip cookies instead of his preferred oatmeal raisin.

    But even as I am willing to feel the heat of anger, I am also willing to feel the spaciousness of peace and trust.

    Perhaps I can stop saying I never would have gone and see that I am going again even now.

    Sharing with a friend via text this morning I wrote: Maybe the trick is learning that the REAL art is what we create outside of the lines.

    Perhaps creating outside of the lines is itself a non-ordinary transcendent experience….

  • LOVE Came Down at Christmas

    I am grateful John and I had a practice run at not being physically with Stacey and her family for Christmas in 2019.

    Last year we attended a Christmas Day potluck at Pine Island Cove with Michigan friends, Linda and Fred, who also winter here in Florida.

    This year, John and I share our day with all of you in our hearts.


    Our hearts are uplifted by the truth: “We isolate this year so that when we can meet again next year no one will be missing.”

    Today, our home-away-from-home may be empty of friends and family, but my heart is full of love for each of you!

    Our hearts are filled with memories!

    Our hearts are warmed by Christmases past.

    Our hearts are nourished with the true meaning of Christmas:

      That Mary and Joseph—Mary heavy with child—traveled through the countryside.

      She was at the time of giving birth to the child.

      They found shelter, simple shelter.

      And many beings experiencing, “The light has been born! Ah… The light is back!”

      It wasn’t me, it was more that my birth opened the doorway so that the Heavenly light—the Love, the remembrance of Love—could pour through.

      What was that star? Let us metaphorically call it an opening in the dark heavens where the remembrance of light and Love could pour through—pour through to where I lay as an infant, not to highlight me but to remind humans nothing is hopeless.

      Light IS.

      Love IS.

      And it is right here.

      And it was pointing at me, but it could be pointing at any of you.

      Here is the ground of love and light.

      And the earth sang, “Halleluiah!” not for my birth but for the remembrance: LIGHT IS, LOVE IS.*

    * Jeshua, channeled by Barbara Brodsky on Christmas Eve 2020, sharing some thoughts about what Christmas means to him and how we can carry the meaning of Christmas through to our times.