Inner work is self-monitoring your thoughts, feelings, body, etc. Anything taking place in your head is suspect! A good teacher will not preach to you about being a better person but will put you to work watching every negative thought and feeling that passes through you. That is how I learned how little self-respect the ego has. It is out to do you in.

You should do your inner work because only in this way will you come to conscious love.

How long does it take?

It takes the rest of your life. You have wasted most of it in trying to stay asleep.

Will anybody notice?

Absolutely not.

Will you change overnight?

Absolutely not.

What is the most important question you should ask yourself?

Do I love myself?

Once you realize that you have never loved yourself, you have come to the natural state of love.

Will I love everyone then?

Absolutely.

Will everyone love me?

No. That is not why you do your inner work. You have chosen to be chosen and this is the process in a nutshell.

Will it work?

It is the only thing that does.

Vicki Woodyard

Yesterday Rob and I celebrated my birthday six months late with my friend, Tallulah. Her husband Bill died of Alzheimer’s in late March. They had bought into a home at Presbyterian Village and it is lovely. Her walls are filled with works of art and everywhere you look, there is beauty.

She took us to a seafood restaurant and we all had fried shrimp and fries. I shared my birthday cheesecake with them and then we took her home. Rob was able to fix a computer problem for her while she and I visited.

I watched a clip of Bill talking nonsense and it was the most endearing thing. He chanted things over and over in a singsong voice. It seemed that he was happy. There was a covid outbreak and he died after four days of it.

Tallulah used to lead a dream group at the cancer community where Bob and I went. We hit it off right away (she hits it off with everyone) and we used to have lunch out together once a month. That stopped during the covid years and now she and I have both quit driving.

We are able to go deep into the soul life together. We talk about events being waking dreams and that is always interesting.

She has a large and loving family, so although she is exhausted now, she will enjoy having them all visit. There will be a service for Bill in mid-June at their church.

I am still listening to Hesse on YouTube. He fills the bill for me, as I said recently.
If this link opens for you, there is some deep wisdom there.

Vicki Woodyard

Lots of things to wrap up this morning. I get my teeth cleaned this afternoon. Then I want to go to Dairy Queen with Rob and get their special Blizzard, S’Mores. I do love their blizzards. I usually get the Butterfinger one, but today, something different!

I notice that on every available surface I have put sticky notes, random piles of papers, grocery lists, things to watch on Netflix. I could go on….you have your own rat’s nest of stuff that at the moment seemed important, but so far never has.

After coffee, I begin to move around the house, looking at the piles and deciding what to keep and what to throw away. If I don’t do this, things will just get messier. Overall, I am a neat freak, although not a clean freak. Disorder bothers me, but dust, not so much.

Before I began, I sat down with a Teresa of Avila writing, from which I will quote parts:

“Every moment can be a prayer.”

Absolve yourself of missing the mark again and again.”

Waste no time. Enter the center of your soul.”

We generally live in our heads rather than the center of our soul, don’t we? We carry on imaginary conversations and feel all kinds of negative emotions arise.

It is time to forgive ourselves.

And when we forgive ourselves, we are, at the same time, forgiving others. That is the way it works.

Vicki Woodyard

How is everyone faring this Easter weekend? Such solemn times we are living in, huh? Everything is being challenged and nothing is guaranteed.

Some of us have been crucified but have not yet arisen. And arising is inherent in the crucifixion. A religion has been created out of just that.

It has rained like the proverbial 40 days and 40 nights here. Now a wind is clearing everything out.

I made clam chowder and it was good. Then I watched a documentary about Leonard Cohen. He is my muse.

Soon it will be Easter. Rob and I are all alone in this old house. We are all alone, even in a crowd.

Oh, there are other people on the planet but each of us is essentially alone. We could not grow otherwise.

Politically we are going to hell; there is nothing but dissent.

It is up to each of us to find our own peace above the fray, though.

“My peace I give you. Not as the world gives, give I unto you.”

This peace is our birthright; no one can take it from us.

Tomorrow the sun will rise and the world will wobble on.

This was not the essay I intended to write; it never is. But it is the best that I can do.

And love would have me sink into its arms and so I shall.

With love,

Vicki Woodyard

Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.” ~ Alice Walker

When I look back over my life, it is not the teachings that matter. It is the clear recognition of loss in my own personal life. How can it be otherwise? After our daughter was diagnosed with cancer, I remember something well. She was scheduled to have a biopsy at a children’s hospital in Memphis. After we saw the pediatric surgeon, she climbed on a bouncing metal horse on the grassy lawn there. I knew her normal life was coming to an abrupt end. My heart turned sharply, cutting razor wire around itself, as if that might protect me from the all-out blinding pain that lay ahead for our family.

In the years to come, I would be regarded as a Typhoid Mary—that woman whose child had died during the summer of 1978. I brought that up today sitting around with my fellow Tai Chi students after class. “Tai Chi is big for me,” I said, “because my life is small.” It probably can’t be otherwise. And yet because of loss, the teachings point me back to myself. To regard the razor wire and know why I put it there so long ago. My tears have rusted it though, softening me around the edges.

How can I write about what matters when it was so long ago and now so far away? The intimate smell of a child and her blanket, the saliva glistening around her sweet thumb. 

What teachings can offer comfort when a child is dying? Yes, death comes to every household, but not usually so early on. The buddha could not rock that child when she screamed with fear. A grown up teaching could not make her smile. Course material for the intellect doesn’t work on children.

I offer you this. While human life is limited, it is also infinitely untouchable. The wreckage is beyond repair. The light points to a far off heaven where little children do not die. But we cannot hope to reach it and make everything all better. I would suggest to you that just sitting quietly with your own wreckage makes more sense than listening to someone posit theories about awakening.

When I visit the cemetery where she and her father lie buried, I just have a deep sense of unreality. Where did all of that life go? What will it be like when I see them again? And don’t tell me I won’t cry for joy.

Vicki Woodyard

A disciple hit the wall one day and asked his guru where all of his good feelings had gone. “Just beyond splat,” the guru said, “just beyond splat.” What happens just beyond splat?

The inner life cannot be taken for granted. We are being asked to step it up, to go deeper and stay truer to ourselves. If not, we founder in the desert of Facebook. It’s a great tool, but it has absolutely nothing to do with your inner life. That’s how we set up the game. The easier it is, the more we fall into it. The harder it is, the more we evade and avoid. That’s human nature.
We have to live consciously or die mechanically. Strangely enough, it’s our own funeral or rebirth every moment.

Fairy princesses and magic kingdoms are not found here. What you do is find out who you really are. What you are made of and how everything came to be just as it is. Without a sound track or a voice over explaining how you felt when your hopes were dashed, your father or mother died or your best friend turned out to be a fiend. I have just written a book about how it is with me. I know myself and therefore I know you. Dare we say hello?

I was born to the path and will die on it. Choiceless about it all, I have nevertheless thought that I was in charge of my pain and suffering. It was my job to “make it stop.” But it just wouldn’t. A child died; a husband died; I was reborn as a bereaved parent and a widow in the course of my life. The path, once uphill all the way, sometimes meanders by streams of stillness and Leonard Cohen warbles from high up in a tree. He, more than anyone, inspires my later life. Looking at the man in the finely tailored suit wail about the courage and the danger of it all, I fall in love with life as he sings it.

This life is born to sing the blues within us all. It is a mighty Mississippi of travail and sudden catastrophes. Don’t go all puppies and kittens on me when I say that. I have sat beside a dying child who happened to be mine. I have walked away from the children’s hospital carrying bags of her things. Her gown and robe, her books, a liter bottle of root beer. That was all she wanted those final days. She smelled of urine and her mookie, as she called her blanket. Life stood still and the sea of grief raged within me. I survived.

And so I sing the nondual blues. Me with my doghouse bass of an iMac. I could be on Lonesome Street panhandling. I could be in an angelic choir. But I am here pounding out the words that arise as I totter down the blank screen. I am here to testify. To say that I am and deserve to be. To be forgiven and held, blamed and absolved, understood and blessed. I need the whole thing.

When I cross over, I will no doubt be reunited with small child and long-beloved husband. They are probably hanging out here with me in my dining room of an office. They know me in all my glory. In my fear of socializing, my dread of small talk and my utter love of truth. They could kick me in the rear and bathe me in tears. Love is like that. And I soldier on.

LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT is my new book. Child and husband are in its pages. Sweat and toil and tears commingle with the joy of finally taking down the wall. Yes, writing the book has taken down my wall. Now I am free to be with life as it unfolds fiercely and forever. I pronounce myself man and wife and child and dog and…well, you get the picture. I am not held hostage to how things should be. Love has renounced that vow.

I write to yank you into the picture with me. Abruptly break the dream of being separate from each other. Your interest marrying my intention to convey what is inside my silence. The verge of the Absolute can be seen if you are willing. The brink of suffering is intensely alive and on fire. When I came home to a life without my daughter in it, I had reason to go on. My son was almost eleven and was devastated by the loss. The family fell apart into the arms of grief unshared. You cannot share the freshness of the wound at all. Not at all. But one day turned into another and season gave way to season and we soldiered on. Flowers bloomed on stalks of green and bills were paid with regularity. I found myself learning about the path while being drug along it by an unseen force.

Something inside of me would not give up. It would know the wisdom of this life or die trying. All I had to lose was the pain. I was dignified but within a fortress that no one could penetrate. My brother said, “It was like you dropped a steel curtain with iron spikes.” That is how one survives such a thing. I still know and can see what clothes lay in her dresser the summer that she died. Shorts and tops and sandals left to be given away. I was a mother parenting a young boy who was suffering deeply and could not talk about it. I was married to a man who turned into a workaholic to drown his grief. We were strong and wounded and no one paid us any mind. That is how it was with us, that summer of 1978.

Now I have been a widow for six years. A strong widow with inner resources that bloom like lilies on a frigid windowsill. I thrive on silence and the gift of peace. And still I get up every morning thinking I don’t look good enough or feel strong enough to take on the world. The mind of stupidity runs the show much of the time. But in the silent background love peers out and says hello. I turn within to greet myself. She has taken down her wall and I am so happy for her. She is like a small child growing like a weed. I ask her if she would like some sweets and she grins at me. She takes them to the couch and unpeels the silver foil. She rests like a flower and I regard her with love. She is my charge and I will do right by her.

LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT: That’s How The Light Gets in has been called a direct journey into the Self.

VickiWoodyard

My anthem flows out of me like water
rivulets of rhythm paced by the moon
and stars and my very own innards.
Sing! I cry to my inner child…the wounded healer
that she is is happy to oblige.
I remember, I remember, she sings so sweetly.
I remember how it was with me before I was even born…
It was then I took up singing in the world beyond the world
and heard such heavenly music that it broke my fragile heart.
And still I sing! I sing to mermaids and mermen and
Herman’s Hermits. I sing to Kermit and leprechauns
and fawns and roses.
There can come from me such a cry of wonder that it cracks the egg from which I am now hatched into this weary world. I forget now how wonderful it was up in those heavens.
But still I sing.

Vicki Woodyard

It is very hard to work on oneself. If you disagree with that, you are a bare beginner. Last night when I learned of Donald Trump’s indictment, I lost energy feeling self-righteous. Today I have almost no energy, thanks to me forgetting my spiritual lessons.

So that is the situation. Now on to the solution.

I am a child of God.

As a child of God, I am loved and I love.

When I lose energy, I must realize that I have done this to myself.

The remedy is inner silence while my energy is being restored.

There is no magic formula for getting back on track.

Just know how tired you are and show compassion to yourself,

I promise you that there is no other way.

Vicki Woodyard

I have never been a social animal. Introverted and clearly seeing that socializing was not something I enjoy, it has been easy for me to stay home and study.

I say “study” loosely, for I have long finished reading about the inner way. It is best to say that I finally understand that society has no interest in awakening.

And here comes the final truth: I have no interest in awakening! Yep, we have to get that personal about it. Jesus was speaking to a very small group of people and none of them were awake. And the masses didn’t even have such a concept. They were happy celebrating weddings and mourning deaths and everything in between.

Now me, I have done my level best to understand the nature of enlightenment. I still don’t get it. If I did, I would no doubt lead a different life.

The essays I have written are based on my desire to awaken and my clear failure to do so. So I can talk about myself as “Vicki.” But to me, I am just me, as you are just you.

In spite of my failure, I was led to Vernon Howard, a teacher who insulted everybody. Those in his school worked very hard to become enlightened and he would say things like, “None of you are awake.” You see, enlightenment is just a concept; it has no basis in reality.

If you look around you and read the news, you hear and see quite nasty things. That is why there are such things as imprisonment, stealing, lying and cheating. But if you are really trying to wake up, you will see that you, too, are capable of deeply damaging things. (This is called repentance.)

When repentance happens, then you truly have a chance to wake up. And as you stir in your sleep, you will begin to truly love your life because you have left society to spend your time to heal yourself.

I am a creature of habit and you probably are, too. So I do my duties in this world and the rest of the time, I am consciously in God’s presence. “Cleave a piece of wood and I am there.” Yep. I am with God right here and now. Sadly, most of the time I forget this. But God has His little reminders and for those I am grateful.

Vicki Woodyard

Dear Readers,

Easter is a good time to ask for spring donations to my website/blog. I write easily and frequently, BUT I have to pay for my host and for other expenses relating to them.

I don’t want you to donate a lot, but small donations can add up.

If you can’t, don’t worry about it. And if you can, please do.

I aim to keep writing as long as I can, so appreciate me now and avoid the rush 🙂

Love,
Vicki

DONATE HERE.

And thank you soooo much….