I
almost died in Tibet this summer. I am particularly fond of the word “almost”
in that sentence. You, dear reader, may have been more drawn to the word
“Tibet”. “What in the world was she doing in Tibet?” you may have asked
yourself. I’m with you there. I asked myself the same question over and over
again—particularly that dark and gloomy night in Lhasa as I felt the life force
slipping away from me.
Melodramatic?
Not really. At the same moment our young, strapping China guide was in an
unsavory Tibetan hospital on IV, his coworker holding him in her arms,
whispering intently over and over again, “Don’t die! Don’t die!” And in rooms
down the halls of the hotel where I was staying, many people were suffering from
high altitude sickness. One woman, between vomiting and diarrhea was pleading
with her husband to please, please, please air lift her out of there!
I
knew none of this as I lay in my room verging on panic myself. My own version
of altitude sickness was heart pains, dizziness, weakness, and a fever—the last
of which concerned me. The Tibetan guide (who was a young Chinese Han girl) had
commanded us not to get a cold! A cold very dangerous! Don’t get cold!
She had yelled that during an introduction to Tibet lecture on the old bus as it
bumped along during the hour and a half ride from the airport to Lhasa. I
wondered what made a cold so dangerous and how we were supposed to control cold
germs, but I didn’t ask because by that time I already had my head between my
knees to keep from fainting and didn’t want to risk sitting up. For a while I
had been able to watch the passing countryside as I had squatted in a seat
surrounded by luggage (the bus was not large enough to hold all of us and
our luggage comfortably—all we lacked were a few chickens and pigs). I looked
at the barren mountains devoid of vegetation. I had expected snow. There
wasn’t any. They looked rocky and dry even though the waters of the river were
overflowing. Along the road a few soldiers oversaw some workers as they piled
up sandbags at one point where the swirling brown water threatened to flood the
road. Even then I was hoping there would be no problem in getting back out in
four days. Few people and animals were about: cows, yaks, a man with a cart.
The Tibetan houses we passed seemed desolate. Every so often, we’d pass a
Chinese compound—ugly and enclosed as a prison—no indication of its use.
Factory? Barracks? Prison?
We
stopped at one point. May, our Chinese guide, said we could visit the small
Tibetan village along the side of the road. I got out of the bus hoping the
air, thin and strangely dry would revive me. It didn’t, and the poverty
depressed me. I felt despair in the air and the ground. Was it me or this
place? I sat on a pile of rocks on the road unable to face the village.
Children ran about grabbing at us, dirty, their noses running. I wasn’t up to
this. One woman in our group crossed the road and made the mistake of trying to
give the children some money. There was a melee—a feeding frenzy. She was
practically being devoured. A couple of men went over to rescue her as I
climbed back on the bus. That did me in. That’s when someone gave me a seat so
I could put my head between my knees. The children were leaping up and pounding
on the windows of the bus. We managed to get going without running any of them
over.
We
finally got to Lhasa. I looked out the window and saw more of the barrack-like
structures. “This Chinese side,” our guide explained. Lhasa is split in two at
the Potala Palace: one side is Chinese. The other side is Tibetan. We never
toured the Chinese section. “Your hotel in Tibetan side,” the young tour guide
screamed, “Don’t go out after dark alone. Very dangerous!” The
buildings here were old, dingy and crowded.
By
the time we arrived at the Hotel Shangbala in Lhasa, I was already slipping away
and incoherent. Someone got me to my room and plopped me on my bed. A worried
desk clerk brought up a rubber pillow filled with oxygen and stuck a tube in my
mouth. She released a valve and a shot of oxygen burst down my throat reviving
me. Ah. Oxygen. I hadn’t known how much I liked it. She showed me how to
work the valve and left me to live or die on my own.
The
oxygen helped. After I revived a little, I noticed that the rubber pillow was
filthy. Blue on one side and yellow on the other, it looked as if it had been
on Mount Everest with George Mallory. A little after the fact, I wiped the end
of the tube with an antibacterial handi-wipe that we had been advised to bring.
Oh,
God, where was I? Why was I here? This was not what I had expected. When
signing up for the tour, I had thought, “Oh, boy, China! Tibet! Lhasa! The
spiritual center of the world!”
“Not,”
I thought as I pulled myself to a seated position. Sucking on my oxygen bong, I
peeked out the window. My hotel room was on the fourth floor. It was called
the third floor because the Chinese are superstitious about the number four.
Four means death to them. I’m not sure they would like my Four Principles. The
elevator made me laugh—because of the superstition, someone had pried the
buttons off and rearranged them. Buttons one through three were moved up and
the button with the number four had been put on the bottom. Someone had written
an “L” for Lobby on a piece of paper and taped it over the four. One could
still see the red four shining through clearly underneath the paper “L”. I
wonder if it made the Chinese any more comfortable to be on the “fourth” floor
now labeled “3”. In the large and much more modern hotel in Shanghai, there
were many numbers missing besides four. I don’t know what superstitions they
represented.
Suck.
Hold. Release. Stoned on oxygen, I could see the flat roof of the building
next door—a perfectly square building with A
square hole in the center. Junk was piled all over the roof. A small, fluffy,
dirty white dog ran round and round the flat roof. He stopped every now and
then, leaned over, looked down into the courtyard below and barked shrilly and
piercingly. We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto. The bare mountains beyond were
shrouded in clouds. It was raining. Everything—the dog, the mountains, the
buildings, the window I looked through was gray. Down below in the hotel
courtyard, Chinese men in dark suits came out of a room, got in a fancy Mercedes
and drove away.
I
flopped back on the bed and sucked more oxygen. The blood pumped back up to my
brain and I had a thought. “Oh! That was a Lhasa Apso! Yeah. Lhasa Apso.
From Lhasa! Duh.” Our introductory lecture had included instructions not to
touch a dog in Tibet. Very disrespectful. It might be the next Dalai Lama or a
incarnation of one—I’m not sure which. I wondered if the dog next door was an
angry Dalai Lama barking at the Chinese below. In my musings I began to feel
the symptoms of a cold coming on.
That
night, as my pillow of oxygen lay depleted beside me, I felt myself truly
slipping away. This is it, I thought. I’m dying. Half way around the world.
In a place that feels creepy and dark rather than spiritual—far, far, far away
from the people I love and who love me. Will someone ship my body back or will
they chop me up in bits and feed me to the vultures like they do dead bodies
here?
“Don’t
go there,” I reminded myself. “Stay here.” “Here” was not much better. My
heart was in pain and racing, my head was spinning. I alternated between chills
and sweat, and felt myself falling out of my body. I started praying for help.
Suddenly,
it occurred to me to stop resisting what I was feeling. Okay, I thought, just
stay with the experience. Be present with this. I called upon my Higher Powers
to be with me. I felt myself surrounded by familiar and comforting spiritual
guides. “Okay.” I told them, “I accept that I may be dying, but, just so you
know, my preference is to live.” I focused on just feeling what I was feeling
and heard a voice say quite clearly, “We love you, Katherine, very much.” The
voice was unexpected and deeply compassionate. I felt something deep inside me
relax and shift.
The
next thing I knew it was morning. I knew I would live. I had passed through a
crisis. I looked at the rain outside and thought about my expectations of
Tibet: I had assumed it was the spiritual center of the world. I, like
Dorothy, had traveled the long, yellow brick road seeking Oz. But, my feelings
were telling me something else—besides the altitude sickness, the land itself
felt full of frightening darkness and disease. No, I thought. That can’t be!
This is the Roof of the World! Closest to God, isn’t it? Yet, as I meditated,
I kept feeling as if I were in some vortex of evil. “Evil?!” My mind
screamed. “That’s absurd. There is no such thing as evil. That’s just fear.”
No,
this vibration felt undeniable. Was it the result of the Chinese takeover—the
wanton destruction of the monasteries, the murder
of thousands of Buddhist monks? Absolutely that was part of it, but it felt
even deeper—as ancient as the land itself, wild and pervasive. I thought of the
ancient Tibetan armies—the most feared in the world as they descended the hills
in fearsome attacks on the people below.
It
occurred to me that the intense religious practices here had been a response
to this dark force! Not the result of being in a place benign and close to
God! No wonder religion took such a primary place in life here. Prayers and
constant focus on God was as necessary here as oxygen is to life—as food is to
the body. They had to pray constantly—in order to balance this dark
energy that I can palpably feel.
What
I was thinking seemed so utterly strange—in complete contradiction to what my
mind had assumed or, frankly, any thought I had about life—that I kept trying to
reject it. A dark force in the land? Could there be such a thing? But, maybe
that is why strangers were not so welcomed here in the past. They would not
understand. Their negativity and lack of spirituality would throw off the
balance. If this is true, I thought, the Chinese have made a big mistake here.
By destroying the monasteries, and killing thousands (maybe millions) of
Buddhist monks, they have thrown off the balance. The dark energy feels very
strong now. Mao said, “Religion is poison.” If only he had said, “Religion
can be poison,” and taken a more considered look. Certainly religious
differences that lead to wars are insane, but the Tibetan Buddhists were gentle,
dedicated pacifists. They weren’t poison. Just the opposite! They were the
healers. Mao was wrong. Mao was wrong about a lot of things. Even the Chinese
readily admit that.
I
slowly sat up from bed, got dressed and went across the street to the little
store called “Memory of Tibet” where I was told they sold inexpensive cans of
oxygen. I bought several—determined that I wasn’t going to miss the trip to the
Potala Palace. After all, I wasn’t going to have traveled halfway around the
world without seeing what I came to see. (I didn’t even have to reset my
watch. As big as China is, there is only one time zone—exactly a twelve hour
difference from Connecticut.) Of course going up to the Potala was a difficult
climb (one of the many in China)—up a steep, long road, stopping for oxygen hits
and video taping the sights (accompanied by sounds of my own labored
breathing).
In
the Palace itself, we felt our way along the walls through a few pitch dark
rooms before reaching other dimly lit cave-like rooms stuffed with Buddhas and
too much (to the Western eye) art work. One of the women of the group whispered
to me, “Years ago, I would have found this scary.” “Years ago?” I thought. I
was aware of so many fierce faces carved everywhere. I was told they were to
frighten away evil spirits—that the faces were supposed to be scarier than the
evil spirits. Ah so! Tibetans believe in evil spirits. I found out that they
also believe in ghosts. Peculiarly, they “hate” ghosts. Once a year Tibetans
have a ceremony to drive out ghosts from the corners of their homes.
Tibetan
Buddhism is not a religion of lightness—like say, Unity. No pretty little hymns
about lambs, here. The music of this religion with its loud, deep horns, wild,
discordant banging of cymbals and drums, and reverberating, basso profundo
chanting is pretty scary in itself. “To drive away the evil spirits?” I
wondered. My own view had been that yes, there is darkness, but once it
is brought to light, it can be transformed. Tibet was broadening my view a bit.
My
thoughts about Tibet were too weird to share with everyone, but later, having
survived Tibet and now on a restful cruise down the Yangtze River, I found a
moment alone with Winston, our now-recovered and very smart China guide. This
was a man who had been born in a tiny Mongolian village, miraculously made it to
the University of Beijing and had miraculously lived through the massacre at
Tianenmen Square. He knows a lot. I liked and respected him. Quietly, I told
him my feelings about Tibet. He didn’t disagree. In fact, he told me that a
highly respected psychic friend of his had warned him to not go to Tibet on this
tour—that he might die if he did. He said that the Chinese have a saying about
such a place of darkness. They call it “Poor mountain. Evil water.” I thought
of Tibet’s bare mountains and the yellow water in my tub. I wondered if that is
the reason Tibetans only bathe three times in their lives. I thought how the
many floods that have killed so many thousands of people in China and India
start with the rivers in Tibet. Winston said that people who get the sickest
(like the two of us did) are “People of Justice.” Hmm. Unenlightened, bad
people don’t get sick? It was a strange kind of compliment—a validation for
being so sick—rather than thinking of myself as just a big wuss. Ah, good. I
passed the test for good person. We promised one another never to go to Lhasa
again.
There
is an ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. China was
very, very interesting. And, traveling in China in the July heat was very
hard. I did it all—climbed the Great Wall in Beijing, up to a temple along the
Yangtze River, The Potala Palace, explored the Forbidden City—out every day for
16 chockfull days. Between the pace of our tour, the Tibetan illness, the
pollution in Beijing and along the Yangtze River from the use of coal in cooking
stoves and factories, I came home utterly exhausted with a fierce sinus and
respiratory infection.
The
questions kept gnawing me as we raced and climbed our way through this
whirlwind, non-stop tour of China: what in the world am I doing here? Why did
I come here? What am I getting out of this? God knows it was educational and
certainly an adventure. If I had thought of China much before, I always thought
of Yin/Yang balance, harmony, peace, tranquility—the land of Feng Shui. My
experience in China wasn’t that. This is a country that needs Feng Shui and
harmony. It is a country of wild extremes: too big, too many people,
geographical extremes. Extreme poverty. Extreme wealth. The Forbidden City
has so many rooms that if a new born baby visited a new room every day of its
life, it would be 27 years old before it had entered all the thousands of rooms.
The Great Wall is so high, so thick that it can support palaces on the top and
was built without any machinery on the very peaks of mountains. It would, if it
were in this country, stretch from New York to Los Angeles, and, get this, back
to Colorado again. Inconceivable. The Government of the country has swung from
Imperialism to Communism to a rampant Capitalism in few years. Extreme.
Shanghai is a city that has been rebuilt since 1992. The construction that is
going on everywhere literally took my breath away—huge new bridges, tunnels,
hundreds of new skyscrapers. Extreme. Years ago, Mao said, “Have babies.” The
population exploded. Deng said, “Stop having babies.” Now they are only
allowed one per family. The Three Gorges Dam is going to be the largest dam in
the world. Over a million people are being relocated. In China’s extreme
survival problems they come up with extreme solutions that create other problems
(i.e. the recent NY Times article about a region in which the government bought
blood from the peasants to get them more income only to create an AIDS epidemic
so severe that it is a now a region of orphans). Mao’s Great Leap Forward
caused 30 million people to starve to death. The Cultural Revolution is
acknowledged by the Chinese themselves to be a national nightmare. Extremes.
The cruelty of foot binding to create extremely tiny feet. The so-called
“forbidden stitch” so tiny that it made young girls go blind. The Bamboo
Curtain making China too closed. Now, perhaps they are too open—so many Chinese
have alternative Western names like Winston, Peter, Mary, speak English fluently
and sing American rock and roll songs by heart. We have never known anything
like the extremes they have and continue to swing through. The Chinese
pendulums swing first wildly this way then that.
The people I met were
lovely, generous, beautiful, and probably the hardest working people on earth,
Surprisingly, they could be very funny and laughed a lot. They can accept
extreme changes in their lives and thinking that astonished me. I’m a girl
dedicated to The Golden Mean myself. China exhausted me on many levels.
When I got home, I
think I slept for 24 hours straight. I was sick, jet-lagged, and stunned by the
experience. When I recovered a bit, my internal clock was so off that I could
not get to sleep until 4 or 5 in the morning. I started reading every book
about China that I could get my hands on. I watched all the movies: Seven
Years in Tibet, The Last Emperor, Kundun—even one of Marlene Dietrich’s old
movies Shanghai Express—which was surprisingly historically and
culturally accurate in many ways in spite of its silly story. I flipped on the
TV in the middle of the night and was confronted with a Richard Gere movie,
Red China. I was still trying to make some sense of it all, trying to
“land”—to get why I had gone there. Like Victor Frankel said in his great book,
The Search for Meaning, we need meaning in our lives, it was the one
difference he noticed in the survival of people in concentration camps. The
ones who could find meaning in their experience were remarkably more likely to
survive. I couldn’t get it.
“Mystery!” was a word
that was whispered to me as I meditated on the bus while the others were off on
yet another shopping trip in China. (The Chinese do try to get us rich
Americans to buy, buy, buy!) “You’re here to get that life is a lot more
mysterious than you have ever known.” That seemed like a very good answer at
the time. It helped. It was certainly true, but I knew there was more. I
couldn’t get it.
Then, not quite a
month after I returned from China, I led a Creative Explosion workshop that I
had scheduled even before I left for China. I had hoped that I would be
“complete” with the experience and use the workshop to shift into the fall.
Something much more interesting was about to happen.
The year or so before
I had gone through a period during which I did not do workshops. I needed to
take a break after Mother and Cowboy died. I needed time to heal. Taking a
break is very empowering. About 10 months ago I felt ready to do them again. I
have done four in the last year, and they seemed easier and more powerful than
ever. It was during these workshops that I encountered a desire to travel.
That went on my list. Opportunities seemed to pop up like magic. In April best
buddy Babs took me to London, and we had a great side trip to York, and the
Yorkshire Dales. In June I was invited by my dear friend, Gale to join her and
her family on a houseboat on Lake Powell. Great fun! It also included time in
LA and Las Vegas. Then, in July I took the plunge and went to China. The
American tour guide was a great guy I know, Greg Tamblyn.
The latest workshop
was a wonderful group of people—a few people I’d never met and some I had known
for years. As it was an odd number of people, I was not needed to partner with
someone, so I moved from couple to couple as they went through their processes.
I felt as if the earth was becoming solid under my feet again after all the
traveling. I felt grounded and blessed and calmed by the workshop.
The day after the
workshop I was meditating and suddenly “got it”. It was not just about China,
but about all the traveling I had been doing in the past few months. Suddenly
parallels and patterns emerged. I remembered climbing up and walking on top of
the ancient city walls that had surrounded and protected the old town of York.
I sat in one of the turrets and looked down at the thousands of gorgeous yellow
daffodils in full bloom down on the hills that buttressed the walls. Perhaps
each one of them represented a life lost there. I thought of the extreme)?
in degree only) Great Wall—put up for the same reason—costing possibly millions
of lives. Then, I thought of one of the participants of the workshop who saw a
wall inside himself that “protected” him from truly being with another person.
As he touched that wall inside himself, it dissolved and he started seeing
himself as a baby, holding himself as a baby, loving that baby and weeping
profusely. Ah, how awesome it was to see him in that process—a sacred recovery
of himself.
I remembered staring
in awe at the largest stained glass window in the Cathedral at Windsor
Castle—arguably the religious center of England where the royals are
interred—along with the recently deceased Queen Mother. Next flashed in my mind
the Gold Buddha in the Potala Palace. And, then, I remembered a beautiful woman
in the workshop who was working with negative judgment. Her particular one—one
many of us share—is the belief that she is not worthy of love or success unless
she is perfect. As she stated that, I remember wanting to say to her “Oh, no!
That’s too harsh! That’s too heavy!” Almost immediately, as she got present in
her body, she felt herself with a huge belly, enormous thighs, and a great smile
on her face—like Buddha. She sat in bliss experiencing herself as Buddha. I
could see everything she described vividly---the beautiful flowers surrounding
her, the loving people. Her whole being was radiating. “Awesome!” I thought.
“She IS perfect! No need to worry about trying to be perfect! How incredibly
wise!” And it was all within her. Seeing the Buddha in her was, frankly more
thrilling that even the extraordinary ones I saw in Tibet and China.
I thought of the Glen
Canyon Dam that has formed the beautiful Lake Powell and the parallel Three
Gorges Dam. I thought of Las Vegas and Shanghai---cities like no others on
earth! I thought of the creative visions of people in the workshop, of the
releasing of wildly unexpected creativity in the last quarter of the workshop
and realized that I had traveled all over the world this summer, seen
extraordinary things, had a wonderful time and great adventures in order to get
that the most awesome experiences on earth to me are in this work. I needed to
get how valuable and how much I truly love this work. Like Dorothy, I needed
the experience to see what I had right in my own back yard. Thank you, God. I
am truly blessed.
