Year End Review
Started December 23 @ 1:55 PM

I just finished listening to the recording of the conversation Djwhal Khul and I had on November 25. Thank you very much, Sir, for your advice and insights. Both are very precious to me as we are getting ready to embark into a new 365-day slice of linear time.

I will certainly list below some of the items we discussed, yet I can’t start this review process without mentioning the surrounding silence that is enveloping me nowadays—both from within and in my environment, which seems to be coming to a standstill. And I cannot not mention the fact that I started working with Aruna Byers  two weeks ago. She is an Awakening coach living in Tokyo and my intuition tells me that we didn’t hook up as a coincidence. During the month of November, we exchanged some friendly messages about Japan on Facebook and then, all of a sudden, everything turned around when I asked how receptive Japanese people were to her teachings. Little did I know that she was leading satsangs (communication with Truth sessions) that she learned from her guru Papaji. Interestingly, I knew about Papaji’s mentor, Ramana Maharshi, from Master DK’s April 2013 teaching (thank you for the advance notice, Sir!) but I didn’t know Papaji himself, although the town of Lucknow in India was vaguely familiar to me.

Now what?

I have been listening and paying attention a bit more intently to what comes out of this weird thing called ‘my mind’ and asking, as of last week, those two silencing questions: “Whom are these thoughts for?“ and, in case these thoughts are for the Gilles-body that I physically am, another question, “Who am I?”

The most frequent answer to that last question has been “Divine Consciousness”—which is a mind answer, obviously.

As I said, now what? The mind is still active and ‘things’ are still sipping through, but at a much quieter pace. The experience I had this morning with our greeting cards made me realize that fear is still lurking in the background, although its intensity has diminished drastically to a level where it’s much harder to notice. Is this childhood fear of being scolded, by my mother then or wife nowadays, still alive? How soon will it definitely dissipate? And does the fear make any sense to the Gilles-body that I am?

Time will tell. It is on my side.

Interestingly number two, I gathered some ideas at the beginning of the month for my year-end review but never wrote anything until today. Now I am much more inclined to talk about the incoming year, and the ideas that have burgeoned lately, as I am to talk about what took place in outrageous 2013. Perhaps one of the interesting facets of the fall period was for me to revisit events that occurred more than 20 years ago, and being suddenly able to label them—such is the case of my Dark Night of the Soul experience which took place in November 2001 in Wisconsin. Why did it take me so long to revisit the event and realize that it might have opened an entry door to a different, deeper inner realm? It did, in fact, and that was confirmed by Aruna after she read my story.

The other intriguing occurrence of the last six months of 2013 was this dance of hormones in my body. My level of testosterone went down, my level of prolactin went up (this is the hormone responsible for women’s lactation) and all of this might have to do with the fact that I am parenting, in my own feminine, motherly way; something which hasn’t happened to me till after I hit the half-a-century mark. How interesting! The notion of spiritual androgyny has been introduced to me and it deserves a bit more attention, knowing I seemed to have regained weight lately, out of nowhere, again.

An idea that stuck with me in my conversation with DK is, as he put it himself, this prospect of “helping people reframe their lives.” A new person, a new companion entered my life in November, and we may be doing a bit of spiritual companionship together in the New Year; I am certainly looking forward to that, as a way to both help her and learn more about Life. Developing “spiritual curiosity” is definitely an area I would like to explore with her, and anyone else interested; I believe she’s ready for it and willing to take a big dive.

Will this idea eventually turn into a workshop? Pourquoi pas? Why not? It would certainly help me deepen my desire and continue my work of “helping people see;” see what their lives is made up of, and see how much difficulty societal programming has created in their lives.

Buddhists conceive of enlightenment as having two qualities: a quiet mind and a Self empty of programming.

What a nice, arduous peak to consider climbing!

[Full Moon over Mt. Rainier, Washington state, July 22, 2013. Photo Kathy Yates. Reproduced with permission.]

Nine years down the road, I am amazed how current the mission statement I wrote then is:

2004 Mission Statement

“With patience, love, courage and compassion,
I will guide and empower
myself and others
to discover and access
that place of goodness
and meaning
that resides within,
and act from it.”

This is part I, folks, to be continued before the end of the old year. Stay tune!