Dalai Lama

Being Gratitude

Cate Kodo Juno 6 Comments
Offering prayers at Warrungup Spring

Offering prayers at Warrungup Spring

Meditation:
Breathe in beauty; breathe out gratitude
Take a moment to look around you and allow your eye to settle on something that strikes you as beautiful – the view out the window, the way the light glances off a surface, your own reflection in the computer monitor. Feel that beauty with your body, breathe it in. How wonderful it is to be touched by beauty – realising that something is beautiful fills our hearts with a deep emotion that includes peace, happiness, calm, connection, and gratitude. Feel a sense of gratitude for being blessed with the presence of beauty and, as you breathe out, feel your body respond to that gratitude in a gentle sigh.
Breathe in beauty; breathe out gratitude
What are the blessings in your life – yes, count them 🙂 And with each blessing remembered, breathe out gratitude. After a short while, your whole body will be feeling a gentle soft tenderness that is simply ‘gratitude’ without an object. Rest a while in “being gratitude”.
Breathe in beauty; breathe out gratitude

2013.01.20.01Gratitude is a blossoming flower of spiritual practice. When we feel gratitude, our hearts open up like a flower opens in the nurturing warmth of the sun and we are no longer isolated and alone – there is a profound recognition of connection with another person, a recognition of our interdependent relationship with something and everything that is beyond our narrow framework that defines “me”.

This is the key lesson I have gained from my own spiritual practice, and “being gratitude” was the central focus of my training in preparation for the Womb World initiation given by the Dalai Lama in Japan in April. I have tried a number of times now to write about some of the intense realisations that I experienced during that trip, but each time I have not been able to capture the essence of those experiences in words. I think it will require a book! So many small steps along the path, since I began practicing in the Buddhist way twenty-five years ago after my bout of cancer, which seemed to culminate in a profound moment of understanding and recognition of the blessing that is simply being alive. This recognition released a flood of gratitude to all the people who have helped me in my life, and all my ancestors’ labours that led up to the point of my own existence, and all the people, animals, plants, wind, sunshine, earth…all the entire cosmos somehow working together so that I might live. How profoundly humbling!

Fishes in Warrungup Spring

Fishes in Warrungup Spring

It has been one hundred now since the Dalai Lama initiated me into the Womb World. During that time I have continued to practice the rituals associated with that initiation, including reciting 10,000 mantras each day. Over this one hundred days I have also continued to offer the prayers that were entrusted to me and yesterday I went down to the sacred Warrungup Spring and made a ritual of reciting the names of petitioners and finally offering up their prayers, which marked the end of that prayer cycle. The sun came out just as I offering the last name and seemed to fill the world with light and blessings.

This active, yang cycle is now complete. Now it is time for me once again to withdraw into a passive, yin cycle that rests, reflects and contemplates.  In honouring and nurturing our spiritual lives, it is essential to carefully balance the yang of outward-flowing energy that is active, with equal amounts of yin practice that draws energy inward and is passive and quiet: to rest in gratitude. Therefore, I will not be engaging in my usual public Wabi’an events for the time being. This means there will be no Kuan Yin Day in August. Thank you for your understanding.

Breathe in beauty; breathe out gratitude

Loving Hands

Cate Kodo Juno 9 Comments
HH Dalai Lama holding the hands of a leper in India, March 2014

HH Dalai Lama holding the hands of a leper in India, March 2014

I have returned home, from my journey into the Womb World on Mt Koya in Japan and the initiation from the Dalai Lama, feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude to all the people in my life who have helped and supported me to reach this profoundly significant point in my own spiritual life path. During this journey I was very privileged to have been entrusted with the prayers of several hundred fellow pilgrims, which I offered at the sacred places I encountered on my pilgrimage and which were ritually burned at the end of my journey. My own prayer now is that I can find skilful ways of passing on the great blessings I received during this time on the mountain to everyone I meet so that this flow of blessings can ripple out into the world.

I will write further about this experience in subsequent blogs, as the teachings I received – from my own teacher, from the Dalai Lama, from the mountain spirits – settle into me and I can find adequate words to describe what precious lessons I learned. For now, I would like to share with you two experiences I had during my pilgrimage.

The most sacred place on Mt Koya is the Gobyo, the shrine where Kobo Daishi (774-835), the founder of the Shingon school of Esoteric Buddhism, is interred and is believed by many to be still living, seated in a state of perpetual meditation. As well as being the starting and finishing point for the 1,200 kilometre Shikoku pilgrimage, pilgrims come here from all over Japan to ask for Kobo Daishi’s help with problems in their lives. Every day during my own pilgrimage in Mt Koya I visited this sacred place as part of my ritual practice.

Path to Kobo Daishi's shrine

Path to Kobo Daishi’s shrine

On one particular day it was snowing hard and the two-kilometer path through the ancient cemetery of Okunoin that leads to Kobo Daishi’s inner sanctum was treacherously slippery and hard going, and there were very few pilgrims about. However, while I was reciting prayers in front of the shrine, a very old man came and stood before the shrine, dressed in pilgrim clothes of white and wearing a pilgrim’s straw hat, now dusted white with snow. He held the hand of a middle-aged woman, who was intellectually disabled and had difficulty walking, taking small staggered steps and holding firm to the old man’s hand. As he explained to her in a quiet, gentle voice, like speaking to a small child, that he was now going to say prayers and instructed her to stay close to him and not walk away, it became clear that the woman was his daughter.

The old man released his daughter’s hand so that he could hold his rosary beads in one hand and a small, well-used prayer book in his other hand. He lit a stick of incense, placed it in the brazier, and began to quietly and fervently pray. His daughter watched the puffs of steamed breath coming from her father’s mouth and found this very amusing, so she made huffing breaths of her own and delighted in the little clouds of smoke-like vapour coming from her mouth, laughing at the way the vapour moved over and around her father’s head. She then puffed out clouds closer up into her father’s face, mingling with his breath and continued huffing breaths around his head and neck. In the process of her happy game, she accidentally knocked off his pilgrim hat, but her father didn’t stop his praying to pick up the hat or to admonish his daughter, but just kept chanting in a rhythmic, lilting voice.

When he finished his prayers, he stooped and retrieved his hat; then, taking his daughter’s hands in both of his, he caught her attention and looked intently into her eyes, whispering something urgent and intimate. Then he just stood there for a moment in silence, holding her hands, with tears streaming down his withered old cheeks as the swirling clouds of their breath intermingled. His gaze was one of complete and unconditional love. Then he said, “Would you like a cake now?”, and in response to her wide smile and nodding head, he took he hand and led her away, back out into the snowy landscape.

I wondered what pressing prayer had driven him through the snow with his daughter to get here – was it perhaps a concern about who might care for his daughter upon his death? There was something deeply humbling in his act of prayer, and the purity and complete openness of that gaze of unconditional love for his daughter had pierced my heart, so I stayed and prayed fervently for their well-being and protection and that whatever he had asked for would be received.

HH Dalai Lama entering the temple at Mt Koya

HH Dalai Lama entering the temple at Mt Koya

The following week, when the Dalai Lama first arrived at the temple in Mt Koya, he came up to me and, greeting me as if we were old friends, he took my hands and held them and looked into my eyes with an expression of infinite compassion. Just like the old pilgrim. In that moment, I tried to bring to mind all of the people who had entrusted me with their prayers and all those who had supported and helped me to get to there, so that they too might share in this moment of blessing, together holding the hands of the Dalai Lama. And I received his blessing with the mind of a child, fully trusting that the gift of his teaching and initiation were bestowed upon me unconditionally and out of compassion to heal all suffering in all beings. And then I cried…

Pilgrimage to the Womb World

Cate Kodo Juno 1 Comment
Mountain Pilgrimage - entering the Womb World

Mountain Pilgrimage – entering the Womb World

2014 Pilgrimage – Journey into the Womb World of the Divine Feminine

For this year’s pilgrimage, I will be undertaking mountain ascetic practices at sacred sites associated with the Divine Feminine in Japan. Undertaking a pilgrimage, especially in mountains, is a physically demanding meditation that takes the pilgrim into a transcendent liminal space that is between life and death, drawing in the inherent power of these sacred spaces wherein spiritual transformation is possible, which then culminates in being reborn into this world. This is why pilgrims in Japan always wear white clothing: white is the colour of death. The journey itself is an act of entering into a sacred space that is a three-dimensional mandala, beyond and yet contained in this world. The Esoteric Buddhist practices that I will undertake in this year’s journey will be focussed on entering the Womb World Mandala, which represents the principles of the Divine Feminine, such as compassion, nurturing and unconditional love; it also represents the source and the reality that we experience in our everyday lives, in all its organic messiness, but which is imbued nonetheless with Enlightenment. Undertaking this journey is a meditation on our own innate enlightened being.

dalai_lamaMy journey this year will culminate in a unique initiation into the Womb World Mandala by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who is being hosted by my own guru and home temple in the sacred precincts of Mt Koya, Japan, for four days of teaching and initiation. This is an event of great karmic significance and I feel overwhelmingly blessed to be participating in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

As always, in my role designated by my guru as “The Prayer Vessel,” at the various sacred sites along the way, I will be offering the prayers, wishes, intentions and hopes of anyone who wants me to offer a prayer on their behalf. In the past 20 years, I have offered thousands of prayers for people of all spiritual paths, from all over the world, and I have witnessed many miraculous events as a result of offering these prayers. It would be a great privilege for me to carry your prayer on this special journey as well. Please don’t hesitate to ask for what you feel you need in your life right now, or offer a prayer of hope for those you love.

Because this year’s journey is dedicated to the Divine Feminine and its manifestation in the Womb World, I will be especially focussing on blessings related to women’s issues, such as women’s health, conception, safe pregnancy and birth, pregnancy loss (miscarriage or abortion), relationship happiness, looking for a partner, looking for love, peaceful family life, success for children’s school life, success for children finding jobs, etc.

Womb World Mandala

Womb World Mandala

How to write a prayer

A prayer is simply a written account of whatever it is that you wish for or hope for; it is a statement of your intention for change in your life. I believe that when you write down your innermost hopes and wishes and desires and intentions, then you are activating that energy into the world: you are actively participating in creating your own desired destiny. My role, in offering your prayer at these sacred sites that are so powerful and ancient, is to magnify your intention – to ripple it out into the cosmos and help that energy to grow. So it is a combination of the energy of your own intention, which is made manifest by writing it down, then amplified by my offering your written prayer in places that are focal points of great spiritual energy, where transformation is made possible. Prayer is a very powerful tool in creating your destiny, and I have witnessed many miracles that have resulted from prayer – even though these miracles may not always be what the person had envisioned for themselves! You may be very surprised at the blessings that enter your life!

The most spiritually beneficial way of offering your prayer is to write in on the back of a sacred text called The Heart of Wisdom Sutra, which is an ancient text succinctly describing the nature of Reality. Because each Chinese/Japanese character is a pictograph – a symbolic picture of an idea – when you trace over its letters, you are creating an abstract painting of that Reality. Even if you don’t understand these words, there is a great spiritual satisfaction in ‘painting’ it as a writing meditation. So, first you can trace over the letters of the sutra, and then when you’ve finished, you write your prayer on the back and then send it to me. I recite your prayer at the sacred sites, offer it at the temple, and then it is ritually burned by the priests at the temple, which completes the offering of the prayer. You can find a copy of The Heart of Wisdom Sutra and more information about sacred calligraphy in the section “Sacred Calligraphy” on my website www.catekodojuno.com

Please contact me at catekodo@gmail.com and I will be happy to help you with your prayer. Or, once completed, send it to Wabi’an, 8 Bouvard Drive, Bouvard WA 6211, Australia by March 31st. I do not charge anything for this service, however, it is appropriate to send a monetary offering to be made at the sacred sites as a sign of your commitment and intention. And any donations towards the pilgrimage are gratefully appreciated 🙂

Offerings/donations can be made by cash, money order or direct bank deposit (please contact Cate for details)