Articles

India

"I arrived in New Delhi. God was with me all right, but His ideas were somewhat different than mine.  He turned out to be She in India, a She that I never imagined existed in the narrow confines of my Protestant Christian tradition, a She that reached out to me not in the protective walls of the ashram, but in the streets seething with poverty, disease, and love."

I read these words as I sat in the airport in Chicago waiting for my flight to New Delhi. A friend of mine had emailed this little quote to me as he knew how much I admired Marion Woodman's work. I read it over several times, wondering what lay ahead for me during my own Indian adventure. Soon I would arrive in New Delhi myself, and I put my computer away with a slight smile feeling satisfied that I had taken in the wisdom of Woodman's words. But something was nagging at me. As much as my male ego desired to assimilate these words into my present experience, I still didn't't seem to fully understand what Ms Woodman was saying about the Goddess she discovered in India. How does poverty, disease and love come together as an integrated representation of the feminine God?

When I finally arrived in India my impression was far from Woodman's divine description. Yes, there certainly were streets seething with poverty and disease, but I wasn't quite sure of where the love was. I had come to India leaving a whirlwind of personal emotional debris at home, so my frame of mind wasn't quite as even as I would have hoped. I had just moved out of my house of thirteen years, the house my wife and I had picked out with love in our hearts and anxious anticipation for a rich and full life together ahead of us. She became sick several years later and was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. She made her transition three years ago. My trip to India was the milepost that marked the final clearing of her physical being from my immediate environment. I had spent the weeks before my India trip sorting through all of her belongings and clothes. My first sight of New Delhi's crowded and cluttered streets brought my mind back to my garage at home packed tight with the junk of years past.

Someone needs to clean this place up, I thought as my taxi darted in and out of chaotic, seemingly insane, traffic. At the time I couldn't see past the clutter and disorganization, I only wanted to fix it, to clear it, and put everything in an orderly sequence. I had a great desire to make India fit my own idea of what "good living" was all about. Where is the consciousness of these people?' I thought, to allow things to get this way?...to allow the poverty...the sorrow...the pain...?'

I tried to approach India as a therapist and wondered what her presenting complaint would be if she stepped into my office for a session. What would India's past lives hold for her in her healing? Could a nation, as a whole, have a past life? Certainly the lives of all of its people, through time, set in motion the propensities that form a national identity. What did India want to do with itself? What would she want to accomplish in therapy? It wasn't until quite some time later that I realized how arrogant my thoughts were regarding India's desire to be anything at all that she wasn't already being. Certainly it wasn't my place to even question her intentions. I could not see past my own agenda, my own insistence that things should be different, or that there was some “higher� goal of awareness and consciousness that these people, or for that matter, all people, need to attain before really knowing “what is best for them.� I had not yet seen the Goddess of India, nor had I yet seen the love Marion Woodman wrote about.

During one of my first outings into the interior of the city I walked amongst the people of the street. My little group of traveling companions and I were in a local market where merchants selling gutted chickens shared the same space with vendors of fine fabrics and textiles. The street was filthy, and it was almost impossible to see through the cloud of flies that buzzed around me. Everything seemed grey and dingy, cold and hard, almost lifeless as I looked through my personally created filter of preconceived ideas. After a bit of walking I came across a very small girl playing in a puddle of dirty water. She looked up at me and smiled, her perfect white teeth cutting through whatever thickness of separation that was between us. My eyes locked in with hers, and I felt a surge of energy that was indescribable. I don't think I had ever looked so deeply into another human's eyes. It seemed that everything that mattered in the world was right there, right in that little girl's gaze.

After a long moment I looked up and standing in the grey-ness of the bustling market were two young women dressed in sarees of the brightest and most vibrant colors. They were laughing as they talked, holding the fabric of their dress for each to admire. Apparently they had just bought something new to wear and seemed quite pleased with their selection. I looked back at the little girl who had resumed her play in the mud. A half dozen flies were intently investigating the corner of her mouth, with another dozen or so buzzing around her hands. At that moment an understanding of some depth swept over me. Suddenly I was aware of a beauty to every single bit of what my senses took in—the street, the dirty water, the child's smile, the colorful saris and laughing women, and even the flies who were just doing what flies do. Something inside of me had been touched, as if I had put my fingers in a puddle of electrified water and could feel the surge of tingling electricity zip to the top of my head. What had I brought to awareness in this experience? What a miracle my body was, to be able to recognize, through the function of my physical senses, the beauty and the divinity expressed here on this dirty street. God was here, but not the God of action, or of nice and neatly packaged conclusions, but the God of just being, of acceptance, and of knowing that simply being human and living the life a human lives is enough. This was Marion Woodman's Goddess of India. Here was the love, revealed before me in all of the diversity of the world...in vibrant colors, white toothed smiles, dark enchanting eyes of a child, flies, and filthy water all in the streets seething with disease, poverty, and yes, love.

During those special moments on the street in New Delhi it became clear that the wisdom of the world in all of its unique and infinite expression is beyond my ability to fully comprehend. What arrogance I displayed to think that what I was originally experiencing in India even needed fixing, or straightening out in the way that my garage required back home in California. This is God's Universe, and as it unfolds before me I am called upon to take action that causes evolution in this world, but I am not the one to bring forth judgment. My only job is to heal myself, not to bring the rest of the world into compliance with what I believe it should be. There is love here, everywhere, and I can do best simply by revealing it in my own unique and special way. I need only to recognize it, the rest just happens...the rest just is.

The World Congress on Regression Therapy was for me a time of relationship. It was a time to allow old experiences to dissolve into the mist of time and new experiences to come forward out of the shadows of infinite potential. It was a time to discover the symmetry in seeming chaos and to trust the Universe in its infinite wisdom. It was the time to see love, laughter, and the joys of life being displayed amongst the people of a country that was virtually devoid of the material richness that we of the West seem to believe is a pre-requisite for happiness and the expression of love.

Yes, much that I speak of here is a metaphor. India's poverty is very real and there is much human pain and suffering that comes as a result. But here is where the masculine and feminine principles can be combined to effectuate change. We all must do our part, but for me this activity must come from a place of internal healing. I am no judge of the quality of someone else's happiness nor do I have the ability to determine what love means to another individual. I only know what I must do to recognize the expression of love around me...and then reveal that love in my own heart. There is no pity, for pity is an expression of my own fear, but there is compassion, empathy, loving kindness and an awareness that love is all there is. As A Course in Miracles states: Nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists. Love is all that really exists, and nothing can threaten love.

So I leave India with Marion Woodman's words echoing in my heart. I have found God here as well, and God is indeed a She in India. Love shines through the backdrop of seeming misery...but a misery that is more often defined in material terms. We certainly believe it is real, but it is not, and as such, the source of this misery can be threatened, and changed, and removed. But only if we each choose to remove the misery in our own hearts can the misery be removed from the world.

What I have learned from India as a therapist is to trust the heart I see behind the eyes of every client that sits in my presence to know that it is guaranteed that love is there, regardless of the clutter, poverty and disease that may cloud my vision like a swarm of flies. Every client has the answer deep within their being, and as a therapist I do not need to judge their choices, or make a proclamation that they are not seeing things clearly, or as I believe they should see things. When I looked into that little girl's eyes playing in the filthy streets of Delhi she understood me, and I understood her. No words passed, but as fellow human beings we shared the same heart. I did not need to tell her she was suffering, nor did she need to ask for my love. We acknowledged our presence as spirits in this material world, we spoke to one another, and as a result of this awareness we both were healed. She stood witness to my silent acknowledgement of her soul, and through her I knew God.

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Marion Woodman is  a leader in feminist psychology.  In this article she wrote of her visit to India in 1985