Page 41 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

We are disconnected from our bodies, encased in our cars and offices and cities of cement. Like rats in

a cage, we exercise on our treadmills and stationary bicycles; we spend our days in mindless, repetitive

motion on assembly lines, or frantically buying and selling and making deals in offices high above the

ground. At the opposite extreme are those trapped in the backbreaking labor of subsistence or

drowning in the floods of displacement. In mechanized cultures, we sit and stare at our numbing

screens, connected primarily by social media (friends: really? tweets: really ?). As a society we are

doing exactly what a traumatized individual does: engage in superficial, promiscuous false connection

or edit, isolate and shut down until we snap.

It seems that the sheer volume of heartache pouring in has caused it to stop pouring out. The

escalation of atrocities made possible by the sudden, depersonalized, mechanical efficiency of modern

warfare has replaced the undeniable reality of hand-­‐to-­‐hand combat and its strangely personal code of

honor. Colonization, the slave trade, the holocaust, the nuclear bombs, the killing fields, the genocides,

the clear cutting, species extinction and now the impending collapse of the global ecosystem have

reshaped our shared landscape and our responses to it. We are at sea in a toxic soup and trauma is at

the helm.

When we face our demons together, they begin to shrink and transform. In time, they can become our

allies, and we theirs. American teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, Lama Tsultrim Allione has revived the

ancient Dance of Chöd , originally pioneered by an eleventh-­‐century Buddhist teacher – a woman

named Machig Labdrön.12 In this practice, we invite our demons to take physical form. We enter into

dialogue with them, eventually changing places with them, and asking them what they want from us.

We listen until we have heard them fully. Then we dissolve ourselves to become the exact food they

crave. We melt into the nectar that feeds them most deeply, and they feast until they are sated. When

this happens, they often transform from a demon into an ally. It is an ancient practice, so powerful that

in earlier times even epidemics could be stopped when monks agreed to feed the community’s

demons in this way, so that the energetic patterns that gave rise to the illness – ie, that forced it into a

corner from which it could only snarl and attack – were addressed with kindness and generosity.

12 Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict, Tsultrim Allione; Little, Brown & Co., 2008

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