Step #1 Don’t tell me what you are not – tell me what you are. Don’t tell me what you let go of – tell me what you embrace. Don’t tell me what you need to get over – tell me what you are expressing. Don’t tell me what you need to fix or change – tell me what you are creating. Don’t focus on what you are not – focus on what you are.

Step #2 Choose. Do not wait for God, universe, spirit, purpose, destiny, authorities or society to do it for you.

Step #3 Be present to what you are creating, right now. Before you learn how to create what you want, realize how you created what you have.

Step #4 Find out who you are. You are your body, you are your soul, you are your life. Include everything, and everything becomes an expression of you. Exclude it – and it becomes an expression of your trauma.

Step #5 Include death into your life. Death is wonderful, it is a graduation, a transition, as much as birth. What’s there to be sad about? What’s there to grieve about?

Step #6 Travel far. When your background changes you see what is only you, in sharp relief.

Step #7 Believe what you say you believe.

Step #8 Don’t lie. Not to yourself, not to others. Never.

Step #9 Go find out what you want, don’t wait until it finds you.

Step #10 Consider the possibility of your future being entirely different than your past.

I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to consider, don’t want to think of mentors in my life. There is a wall of resistance, a feisty child stomping her foot in protest – you will not tell me what to do!

You will not tell me what to do. No teacher ever had. There weren’t all that many of them, maybe that’s why, maybe I never wanted any.

My first Zen teacher – I stayed with her only because she opened the door wide and said: stay or leave, it’s all the same to me. I stayed.

Did I learn from her? I learned with her. I never allowed her to teach me, not her, nor any of the other teachers I met later on.

I never allowed books to teach me. They put stories in my mind, their own stories, their own words. Once there were too many words, to many stories, too many ideas, I stopped reading them.

This is my life, I decided. This is my life and I will learn from myself. I will sit on my pillow and learn from what I feel. I will live and learn from what I experience. So I have chosen, and there, too, was the little girl stomping her foot, crying – you will not tell me what to do!

And yet I allowed Brooks to teach me. I allowed him and accepted him as a teacher. Why? Why did I let him tell me what to do? Is it because he never really did? Did he see me as a student or were we friends, so similar, so aligned in how we feel and experience that it was natural and obvious to flow together, to open together? Of course his eyes were open much wider than mine, but that changes nothing.

He did not teach me, he did not tell me what to do. He did not fill my mind with stories and words. He opened, and my stories appeared, my words. He did not teach me, he opened and held the space for me to teach myself.

He was a mentor I could accept, a mentor who did not mentor, a teacher who didn’t teach. A partner and an ally. And of those … I did meet a few. Brooks was first, then a pine tree in the forest, high up in the mountains, a rock on the mountain trail, a mountain itself. They showed me how I can be, they opened the space for me to grow and experience. They were my mentors.

And what of the girl stomping her foot in protest?

She can rest here. She can rest when she sits on a rock or leans against a tree. She can rest, sitting in a big leather armchair, facing the old wizard. She can rest and grow, grow into herself her own way, into her own shape. She can do that with a mentor who doesn’t mentor, with a teacher who doesn’t teach.

My first life began when I was born. A little being that jumped out of my mother’s womb into a cold, dark night. Winters come early to Poland, the evenings of October are long and gloomy, wet with freezing rains, slippery with sleet that will soon turn into snow. The white snow will cover dusty streets and sooty, dirty buildings, smoothing the edges, sparkling brilliantly in the lamplight. For a few days, for a few weeks, the city will turn into fairyland. But it was not a fairy land that I saw when I first opened my eyes. The world was cold and dark, and I was scared.

My second life began when I sat on a train. It was a summer evening, golden and brilliant, heavy with the scents of flowers and weeds and sharp smell of hot iron train trucks and railroad ties covered with soft tar. As the train made it’s stately progress through the countryside I read my way through a book. It was a book about soothsayers, about the world of those who can see beyond time, beyond space, about the world where the truth is known. The book said: “all is one”, and my head snapped up, like that of a dog on a scent.
“I knew that!” I realized, “I always knew that! I must have forgotten!”
On that day I remembered that there is more in the world than my life, than my college friends, my boyfriend, my clothes and my troubles. On that day I have decided to look.

My third life began when I rode on the bus. The bus was crowded, strangers were pressing into me on all sides, but I could look through the window over their heads, above their shoulders. It was a spring, and there was some light in the city. Some newness and freshness not covered yet by the dust and the smog. Buildings devoid of their snowy mantle stood stark and dirty, yet cheerful in the early morning sun. I was sad, homesick. After a week in the woods, in a little wooden house, a week spent in meditation, I was going back to work. I was coming back to my everyday life and as I did, while riding on the bus, I made a decision, I made a choice, I made a vow: from now on I will devote my life to my practice. In every choice, in every decision, from this day forward, I will always choose my practice, my spirit, my being.

My fourth life began on a cold, misty morning. I drove into a canyon, hidden in mountains flanking a small, Californian town. The town was called Ojai. I’ve lived there for a year or so, but only few days earlier I have discovered that there was a wizard in residence. That morning I drove to see the wizard. When we met he looked at me, and he spoke, and as he did my body responded even while my mind was laid to rest, forgotten, swept aside. The wizard spoke words that had no meaning, but they reached into my body, they opened it, released it. They made it alive. On that day, twenty six years after my first life begun, my body was truly born.

My fifth life began when my husband chose to divorced me. In a little house, surrounded by roses and shaded by an oak tree, we have lived and fought for years. We fought anew every battle of my childhood, every struggle and every fear. We endured the pain and the trauma, again and again, until it was enough and my husband stopped. It made me stop too. On that day, a bright summer day, we walked down the main street of the little town of Ojai, to have some ice cream and to celebrate our freedom. On that day I celebrated my freedom. My freedom from pain.
“Do not worry” people would say to me, “in a year you will see that this was the best thing that could have happened to you”.
“I will not wait a year!” I vowed to myself, “I will not be in pain for a year, I will not be in pain for a minute longer! I will not be a sad, sorrowful ex-wife – I will be strong, powerful and happy woman!”
On this day I have vowed to become myself.

My sixth life began slowly, gradually. I was born step by hesitant step, so slowly and quietly that no one has noticed. Ideas would come, wishes long forgotten, yearnings from my childhood, plans of being a painter, of being a writer, of being an artist. And slowly, hesitantly, I followed and agreed. I filled a studio with easels and type writers, I drew drawings, painted paintings and wrote stories. I labored through doubts and fears, through shoulds and expectations, through common sense and the need for comfort and safety. This birth was different from all the other births. This time I birthed myself. There was no one to push me, no one to leave me, no one to teach me, to remind me, to show me the way. This birth was the hardest by far.

There are three more lives left, if Pausha’s are like cats, and are allotted nine. Or else I have as many lives as I wish – if Paushas are like Paushas, then they have no limits.

It was a joke at first, you see. Or I thought it was. My yearning for magic could be nothing else after all. Chasing elven tracks in forests, looking under bushes, searching among the flower petals for fluttering fairies – I knew they were there, even as I knew they weren’t. They couldn’t be, everyone knows there is no such thing as magic. I knew that. But I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t want the gray, cold, lonely world where every step brought danger, where one false move meant disaster. I wanted elven pointed ears and fairy’s light step.

And so when you said that there is a wizard living nearby, one that will turn me into an elf, I knew it was a joke. But I took the number anyway. And I made the phone call.

I drove to see the wizard few days later. It was cold and misty up in the mountains, fog swirled in the canyon where the wizard lived shrouding the rushing river, the ancient oaks, the lofty pines. It was as it should be, I thought, climbing up a narrow path, up the mountain slope to a little cabin. It was just right for the master to live up on top of the mountain and for the disciples to climb up and claim the teachings. Claim the magic for themselves.

The wizard had a white mane of hair and sharp, alert eyes peering from under bushy eyebrows. He looked at me and said something. Not much, one word, maybe two. I did not understand, but my body did. It woke up, suddenly it sprung to life, leaving me with nothing to do but to be and to feel. The wizard did not talk, he didn’t lecture, didn’t teach, didn’t explain. My mind, trained to thinking, considering, arguing, theorizing, was as useless as any old tool, discarded and forgotten. the mind that carried me through my life, that kept me safe, that was the mark of my worth, of my value, of my position and importance, had no place here. There was no room for my mind once my body woke up.

The wizard spoke a word and energy exploded behind my eyes. Warm, bright, soothing, blinding. He spoke another word, and another explosion – in my breast, at the base of my spine. Another word, and the glowing suns in my body connected in a rush of heat and force, and my body arched in response.

For a lifetime I sat in the armchair in the little cabin, up on the side of the mountain slope, facing the wizard. For a lifetime white, hot threads swept from the crown of my head to the tips of my fingers.
“That is enough” the wizard said, years later, and I opened my eyes. They looked the same then, my eyes, round and green, but they saw differently.

It was a different world, outside of the cabin. It was a different fog, pearly white and sparkling with raindrops. It was a different river, singing the songs with myriads of voices. And the trees were different, old, wise, rooted deeply in the earth, in the time, in life. It was a living world, and I saw a footprint of an elven foot at the base of a tree, and the flowers rustled as little fairies swooped in their mad, morning dance.

The rocks were warm. Sunned for hours, they soaked up the heat and stored it within their glowing hearts. It radiated softly through their porous skin. ”It feels so pleasant”, I thought, as I run up, jumping from rock to rock, from shelf to shelf, hardly touching the surface in my light slippers. “Like an elf”, I thought. It felt so pleasant to climb lightly and recklessly, higher and higher, up and onward and away from the road, away from the valley, away from the cabins and the coking fires.

What looked like a wall broken into shelves, formed into steps by fallen boulders, climbing steadily upwards, turned out to be an entire world, a landscape of deep valleys and sharp peaks, of smooth-floored meadows overgrown by silvery grass, and forests of brush with their sharp, pointy branches and small shiny leaves. There were rocks as large as a head of a giant lying where they feel, with deep crevices left where they split on impact.

It was quiet there, alien, the human world was only a story and I felt uneasy. I begun to walk slowly, climb cautiously, choosing the gentlest slopes and surest assents. No more running and jumping recklessly. I did not belong there. One false step, and the mountain would shake me off with hardly a flicker of it’s rocky fingers.

I crept up the side of a rock and stopped suddenly. I could go no further. There was a way clear before me but this was high enough, this was as far as I could climb, it was not for me to climb any higher. I sat down. I felt uneasy, scared, I realized, I was scared. The rock I rested on was the size of a small truck and yet I felt that I perched on a little twig over a bottomless chasm. One sudden movement, one swing of a foot and I would fall, slide and crash onto the valley floor where I belong, where humans belong.

I was afraid and, feeling my fear, I looked over the valley laying down below me, carpeted with fluffy tops of pine trees stretching smoothly from one mountain side to another, filling the world with deep, dusky green, covering the gray of the rocks. The valley lay peaceful, quiet, serene underneath the evening shadows, but there was a strip of molten gold and emerald along one mountain ridge, and the sky blazed with a setting sun.

I could not move. What fear could have moved me, torn me away from this place, from this splendor of nature? I sat and felt my fear, and as I felt it I felt the rock I sat on, and the mountains it was a part of. I felt the tall, ancient pines, I felt the cedar trees of red-gold trunks, I felt the river rushing madly down it’s rocky bed. I felt myself and the Earth, I felt the nature and the universe and the fear was gone, because I was here now. I was here. I was the planet, I was the trees, I was the mountains, we were all here – we were Earth. We were nature. We were.

“I understand”, I though, without understanding. “I get it”, I realized, without knowing in the least what I got. The fear returned slowly, creeping in, one soft footstep after another. It was time to go.

I climbed down slowly, cautiously. The danger was not gone yet, I was here and not here now, I was here and yet an alien, a human. This was my place, and yet it was not. I had to be careful.

I wandered through the forest for a long time that evening, following little paths, horse trails running over hills and meadows, wading in brooks whispering among tall grasses, jumping from rock to rock across rushing mountain streams. The sun set, the shadows deepened and I turned towards home, walking through soft, fuzzy dusk, and then the crisp, chilly darkness. Trees called to me, hills full of nooks and crannies filled with soft rock dust, with the fragrant silver grass, beckoned invitingly, tempting and alluring, and still I walked. I could not stay here, I knew. There were people waiting for me, worrying, there was a house and a fire in it, I had to go back. And yet…

There was such safety in this night, such rightness. It was my place, I knew it was. It was home. I belonged there and it was right for me to find a place to sleep somewhere in the forest, to burrow among grasses and spread fallen leaves over my body for a blanket, to rest my head on a root of a pine tree and stay there, in the darkness that felt like home, until the sun rises, until it is time to run and jump and climb again. But I had to go back.

I walked on, down a road that took me among humans once more, down a drive that took me to where my humans were. There was light streaming through the cabin’s windows, stopped short by the darkness. There was fire in the stove and there were people moving uneasily about it, with nervous movements and worried faces. I had to go in, I knew.

I walked slowly, the last few steps though the dark, the cold, the crisp night, my night, my world … I had to go in … and I did not want to.

“Contemporary spirituality” … what an interesting concept … what is it that we call “spirituality”, exactly? Is it subject to fashion? Or progress? Does God change with the times?

Spirituality, defined as being present as what we truly are, appears to me to be beyond times, societies, theories, schools, ideas and concepts. We are – and we make up stories. And sometimes making up stories about what we truly are, and then studying those stories, is called spirituality.

It always begins with an experience – let it end there.