How We Decided To Walk The Tokyo 33 Temple Kannon Bodhisattva Pilgrimage
Posted on March 4, 2020 Leave a Comment
How We Decided To Walk The Tokyo 33 Temple Kannon Bodhisattva Pilgrimage
In times of global insecurity, a week seems to pass as slowly as a whole month.
The coronavirus has been spreading fast, its effects causing waves of panic among the public, and countries closing their borders, which have led to many travel cancellations.
As expected, the losses and closures in China has been rattling the global financial markets.
Now, beside needing to decide if we should go on a pilgrimage to Japan while the virus is spreading and many places will be closed, we are also looking at our investment account, taking a deep breath and trying to remember that the financial markets always respond with nervousness to any major news.
We decided that unless the USA puts Japan on its “Do Not Travel” advisory list, we are going to be brave, not to submit to the fear of the unknown, and go.
Right now, Japan is on the advisory level 2 warning list, asking people to delay group travel and exercise caution.
We have been reading news from Japan daily and we know that many public places in Japan will be closed.
Many of the closures will not affect our pilgrimage, but most of the art museums in Tokyo will be closed for several days after our arrival.
We had planned to stay five days in Tokyo, mostly to adjust to the different time zone and to practice walking daily, before we embark on our pilgrimage.
We thought to spend time in cafes, restaurants and see some art.
Now, we have had to devise a new plan.
The first option was not to stay in Tokyo at all, and adjust in a more rural place that we have not yet visited.
But as the global fear and stress over the coronavirus is escalating, we decided that we should pray for our human family and do a mini-pilgrimage in Tokyo.
Tokyo has a 33 temple Kannon Bodhisattva pilgrimage, dating back to the Edo period.
It is not a well known pilgrimage, but all the temples are located in the vicinity of Tokyo.
We might not be able to visit all 33 temples this time and pray in each one for the well being of all sentient beings, but we will try to walk it and visit as many as we can in the days that we have in Tokyo.
I have prepared a scroll to be stamped in each temple, and we have already packed our backpacks in preparation for the journey.
Now I look at our packed bags and feel that this might actually happen….
Although I still read all the news every day, to see if there are any extreme changes in the travel advisory.
As always, we have packed very little, trying to carry as little as we can on our backs.
We plan to leave in our Tokyo hotel the extra scroll and stamp book, while we continue to walk the Saigoku pilgrimage, and pick them up at the end of our journey.
I am excited to have this temple itinerary that will not be affected by the fears and closures in Tokyo.
But I also feel my own fears and doubts, and I plan to open up and share them as we embark on this journey into the unknown….
I know it is foolish to allow fears to occupy our holy minds.
The Zen master Rōshi Kodo Sawaki (known as Homeless Kodo, because he did not own a home or a temple) wrote:
“To be born as a human being is a rare thing, and we should be grateful for it and use our lives meaningfully.
It is absurd to get depressed because you do not have money.
It is ridiculous to be neurotic simply because you do not sit in the VIP seat or cannot get a well paying job.
It is foolish to cry because you were rejected by your girlfriend.
Rather, having been born a human being, live a life worth living.”
With light filled blessings and with healing thoughts to all those who are infected or affected by the illusions of the world,
Tali
P.S.
I am adding photos from today’s ski slopes.
Look at the beautiful blue sky.
Rōshi Kodo Sawaki said:
“What is the TRUE self?
It is brilliantly transparent,
like a deep blue sky,
and there is NO gap between it,
and ALL living beings.”
Taiwan Walk – Day 6 – A Rest Day in Zhiben Hot Springs, Sightseeing Around Taitung, And More About Our Four Abandoned Puppies
Posted on January 16, 2020 Leave a Comment
Taiwan Walk – Day 6 – A Rest Day in Zhiben Hot Springs, Sightseeing Around Taitung, And More About Our Four Abandoned Puppies
Wendy and Joseph have a friend who lives in Taitung City.
Today he drove us around to enjoy the sights of the area, and helped us with transporting the puppies that we found by the side of the road yesterday.
The phone calls that Wendy made have led her to formulate a plan of action.
Since the puppies cannot go to a shelter until they are at least three months old, Wendy and Joseph have decided to pay to keep them in a veterinary boarding house, where they will be cared for and get vaccinated, and hopefully will eventually be adopted.
If they are not adopted, they will go to the animal shelter after three months.
The cost of boarding the puppies is $500 Taiwanese dollars per day, which is $16.50 US dollars per day.
The three months will cost $1450 US Dollars to board the four puppies.
Not a small amount of money, but puppies are sentient beings and deserve to live and be treated with love and care.
Wendy and Jospeh only allowed me to help with $5000 Taiwanese dollars ($166 US dollars) of the total cost.
Wendy went to a cash machine and got out a large wad of money which she handed to her friend.
He will take the puppies to the veterinarian boarding home and will pay for their care upfront.
Meantime, we photographed each puppy, and Joseph and Wendy’s daughter started a huge Facebook campaign to get the puppies adopted.
Jules and I named the puppies overnight.
We named them: “Tai”, “Pei”, “Wan” and “Tung.”
Their names are a play on:
Taipei (the capital city of Taiwan)
Taiwan and Taitung (The district where we found the puppies.)
Meantime, until the boardinghouse is open, the puppies will spend the night in our Onsen hotel, which has an animal boarding house by the gate, for guests who travel with their pets.
Then we all set off to explore Taitung.
Wendy wanted us to see the highlands, since we have been walking by the coastline for days.
We stopped in town and bought vegetarian wraps from a popular and very busy restaurant.
The thin rice wraps are filled with either peanut or wasabi sauce, topped with vegetables and tofu, and then rolled up and sliced.
They were delicious, as we discovered when we ate them later in a cafe.
We visited the main Taoist temple in Taitung, decorated with beautiful designs both on the roofs and inside.
I took some free booklets on Buddhism and booklets to practice writing the sutras in Chinese characters.
We visited the “Water Running Upwards” site, which clearly shows an old irrigation canal running up the hill, and fairly fast, too!
We walked to some elevated sites to see the views and visited a tourist center selling gifts, Taiwanese foods and teas.
Since we were staying the night in an Onsen Hot Springs hotel, we wanted to go to the hotel with enough time to soak before dinner, and of course to see how our puppies were doing.
The puppies were comfortably sleeping in the guardhouse.
The cage they slept in was large, lined with a big towel, and they had large food bowls that they could not turn over by mistake.
They looked content, and they woke up just as we prepared to check in.
They recognized us and started barking in their little voices, demanding that we hold and hug each one of them.
After checking in, we soaked in the outdoor hot springs.
It was a pleasantly cool night, and the hot springs felt divine.
Dinner was a buffet of local delights.
During this trip, I am trying to eat what Wendy is eating, but with no meat.
She is healthy, fit and slim, and she rarely eats sweets or desserts.
She also eats smaller amounts of food than I normally do.
I watch her at each meal and try my best to follow her example.
After dinner, there were dances and songs by girls and boys from the local tribes.
The most impressive was the bamboo dance, similar to those you can see in traditional Thai and Philippine dancing, when the dancers gracefully jump between two bamboo poles that are clapped together faster and faster.
It was a charming performance and a sweet end to the evening.
Afterwards, Wendy and I went to soak in the hot springs again.
This time we soaked in the indoor hot spring baths.
I enjoyed it so much, I stayed for over two hours and even slept a little in the not too hot pool.
That night, before bedtime, I meditated and visualized an aura of white loving light around our puppies.
I encircled them with love and blessings.
I envisioned them all adopted, loved and that they will have a good life.
May the light of love and protection shine on you tonight,
Tali
Letting Go Of Earthly Goals and Illusions
Posted on November 28, 2019 Leave a Comment
I have been a spiritual seeker for most of my adult life.
I always believed that there is nothing wrong with wanting to make money from my career as an artist, becoming a better person, healing my perceived wounds, finding a man that I love to be with, becoming wealthy, building and owning homes, eating in creative restaurants, traveling and enjoying the pleasures of life, growing up in understanding and helping others along the way.
But there come a time in the life of every sincere spiritual seeker, in which she realizes that earthly dreams, will never truly satisfy her……and that the craving for earthly dreams, never stops….
At this point, I stand looking at the allure of MORE earthly dreams, and truly and honestly evaluate whether or not it is worth pursuing MORE of my time here on earth, looking for goals that do not hold what is real…
Allow me to explain…..
This morning I read an article about an artist in California who enjoys a wonderful art career with exhibitions at the NYC MOMA, and at the Pompidou in Paris.
At first, my mind drifted and I thought that I too, would like to take my own career into the next level and become a much sought after artist…. Playing with multimedia and ideas and having museums and major galleries phone me, asking to exhibit my work.
When I looked deeply into this “earthly career goal ambition,” I recognized that it is not much different from any other earthly goals and worldly ambitions that I aimlessly pursued during my whole life.
I closed my eyes and sat in meditation, seeking the advice of my wise inner guide.
These are the questions that my Higher Self posed to me:
“Will being a majorly successful artist will help you to NEVER get sick?”
To understand the nature of sickness versus well-being and how your beliefs causes and keep manifesting BOTH?….”
“Will it help you never die or understand the energetic nature of the vibrational body, and overcome your persistent belief that the body is a hard, fixed, physical thing?…”
“Will it help you understand why the body ages?… Would it help you understand how your thoughts, ideas and unforgiving beliefs, create all your imbalances, injuries, pain, and all that you wish to let go of?….”
“Will becoming a more successful artist help you understand the making and working of the mind?…..
The essence of life?…”
“Will it help you understand and overcome your identification with your body?…
To comprehend illusions?….”
“Will it help you advance in understanding the inner prison your keep on creating by identifying with your ego…. Or will it serve only to sooth your ego even more and to increase your identification with it?…..”
I sat in the inner meditation and took in the message silently….
I did not need to answer these questions….
It was clear to me that I was wishing for yet ANOTHER meaningless earthly goal…
Some carvings and ambitions that we do not even admit to anyone but ourselves, are very unexamined.
An example comes to my mind, which is very common and not very contemplated by many….. It is the dream of home ownership.
Most people are programmed to believe that owning your OWN home, is a wonderful thing and even a goal worth mortgaging yourself to, for thirty years of your life.
It is seen as a major goal for almost everyone, and one that I too followed for all of my life.
I wanted to own my own lovely designed home on a beautiful piece of land, with a gorgeous scenery, birds, flowers and lots of quiet…. I envisioned myself living there with the man that I love and cherish….
But how did I adopt this dream?….
Not long ago I saw a British TV show about the origin of the ‘Home.’
In it, a history professor followed the history of home ownership, through the last five hundred years.
While watching the show, I had so many insights and realizations coming both from inside me and from attentively listening to the professor, as she eloquently traced the origin of trivial items like the lock and key, and how we came to crave owning our own homes.
As it turned out, home-ownership is a very middle and lower class dream…
Please forgive me for being so blunt, but if you take the judgement value away from this statement, it is literally a true statement…..
There was a time around the world, in which only those who inherited elite titles, the royalty and those close to the ruling families, had the right to even own land or own a house.
Most others lived in rented houses on rented land, and worked their whole lives to pay for their rent, food, taxes and for their living expenses.
The right to own a home, has gone through many phases and evolved alongside the evolution of human rights and personal freedom.
The dream of home ownership became a victory of gender, as women fairly recently were allowed to inherit the family’s wealth and were permitted to own land and title to their own homes.
At a later point, homes were designed to show-off the success and material wealth of the owners, and had become linked with the search for self expression, creative design and even as a retreat to pursue religious and personal freedoms.
Owning a home in modern times, had morphed into a statement of liberty, autonomy, personal power, safety, financial independent, and much more.
A lot of unrelated things got entangled with the concept of home ownership.
After mindlessly craving, wishing and manifesting the dream of home ownership, I am now at a point in my life in which I look at this dream…. and I cannot help but smile at how naive and unenlightened I was…
Houses are not homes… They are walls lined with money, soil and a LOT of maintenance and financial commitment.
Yes, of course a house can be a home, if you imbue it with loving energies and with your own soul… But it is still your own perception that makes the difference and establishes the definition.
Now that I enjoy free roaming the world with a small backpack and a minimal amount of possessions, it seems a bit silly to pay many tens of thousands of dollars per year for houses I spend so little time in…. For insurances, real estate taxes, electricity, phones, Internet, garden maintenance, repairs and upkeep, a mortgage, cars that rarely get used….. and many other expenses related to owning homes and cars…..
Do not get me wrong…. I enjoy my homes very much and do not suggest that I would be HAPPIER if I had none…
It just that now, I can look at this dream of home ownership that I built into my consciousness without even remembering installing it there…. And realize that it holds nothing real….
After coming a full circle, I can say that yes, it is good to have money to enjoy your life and to never feel lack and the stress of debt or needing to work for a living…….. but…… Now I can see that if this dream was not so established in my mind (as I am sure it is in YOUR minds as well)………I could have been just as happy owning or even renting a smaller apartment in a place that I enjoy living in, and using the money to travel often.
I am sure that most of the people who will read this, will disagree with me… And that is OK with me…. I know now that I cannot submit to the messages of my ego, which masks themselves as coming from my true Self….
My ego will ALWAYS be fearful and never grow up….
This is because my ego identifies itself with my body, and perceives itself to be weak, vulnerable to attack, perishable and mortal….
Now that I have come a full circle, I would never truly feel shuddered if something were to happen to my homes, and I cannot bring myself to feel truly sorry for those who cannot afford to buy or own more real estate, cars, boats, hot tubs or planes….
It is in our detachment from our career-identity and in the freedom from attaching those things to our true self worth, that we can find true happiness….
I still believe that there is NOTHING at all wrong in enjoying earthly dreams.
I just do not feel that any of them are worth spending my time running after…. And I no longer believe that they are needed for our happiness and for our well-being, or should be cried over, or take center focus in our hearts and minds…..
Wishing all of you a wonderful illusion-free day!
Tali
P.S.
Today is Thanksgiving day in the USA.
It is a good time for me to express my deepest gratitude to you all, and to the abundance of Mother earth.
May you realize the Mighty “I AM” Magical Presence within your very own being, and ascend to a higher realm of living in which you can know first hand, the unlimited potential of your being.
With love and light,
Tali
