The Power of Compassion

Twenty-Four Years Ago–Today! Milton Nascimento and Pamela Bloom June 6, 2010

Weird things happen when you Google your name. Your past comes up in your face.

I confess, I do it in moments of weakness and just to see if anybody has been reading my books.

Today, I decided to cue in the phrase “June 2010″ along with my name, and somehow I discovered, via the aegis of GoogleAngel, an article I had published…ahem…24  years ago! As a music critic. In the Los Angeles Times.

I thought that article was gone forever. But my love for the Brazilian musician Milton Nascimento never has. A voice that I had once described as…”if Moses looking into the Promised Land could have sung, he would have sounded like Milton Nascimento.”

All this during my Brazil days when I was traveling from Rio Grande do Sul to Manaus and writing travel guides. The first time I was supposed to meet Milton, in New York, for the magazine Musician, the Village Voice journalist before me had made him mad and he cancelled my interview. A year later, I just happened to be in Rio on another assignment when the call came through.

Would I like to meet Milton and  possibly go on tour with him?

Does the word Brazil have an “i” in it?

I was so star-struck. At that time, a godly presence emanated from him, almost like a spiritual master. He was so shy, he barely talked. I thought I had botched the interview.

Then another call came. Would I like to go on tour with him and his group?

The best memory I had of that time was sitting on the plane next to him.  He, this great, introverted star who had two words of English. Me, a  finger-biting journalist who at the time could barely speak Portuguese. I think I asked him about the guitar in his lap that he wouldn’t let go of. Smiling that smile of his that takes eons to complete, he told me Pat Metheny had made it especially for him.

My deep love for Brazil is concentrated in the music of Milton Nascimento. His voice is the color of the sky and soil of Minas Gerais, his home region. His lyrics are both intimate and transcendental. If you have never heard his music, buy it, NOW. “Milagos dos Peixies” (Miracle of the Fishes), a profound mass for this age. “Encontros Despididas.” “Minas.” “Gerais.” “Clube da Equina.” He has made numerous albums in the last 24 years, but these are the ones that first leaped out of his soul and  imprinted their magic on mine.

For me, Brazil has one name. And it is Milton Nascimento….

A true prophet in sound.

The link to the Los Angeles Time, June 6, 1986

Youtube of a beloved Milton song:

Don’t stop there.

Imagine a Different Kind of Memorial Day May 31, 2010

It’s Memorial Day in the U.S. and the New York Post’s poignant photo of a gray-haired vet leaning on the Vietnam memorial of a fallen comrade made me contemplate who and what we are praying for today. While I am thankful for the freedoms fought and won for, it is difficult for me to justify letting others kill for my sake. I don’t believe any human soul walks away unscathed from the experience of war, no matter how  justified it seems or how much flagwaving we do.  My prayer on this day is that we as a human race discover a new way to create and maintain the freedoms we so cherish– not only for ourselves but the world.

In honor of the spiritual import of this day, I offer a story from my book THE POWER OF COMPASSION: Stories that Open the Heart, Heal the Soul and Change the World, written by the Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh. Early in the last decade, Thich Nhat Hanh organized a retreat for American veterans of the Vietnam War. Many of them—women and men—were struggling with anger, self-loathing, and guilt, and deeply desired to find a way out of their personal hell. Calling upon his own experiences of torture during that war, he shared  a perspective that transcends the ordinary mind of pride and revenge, and most importantly, points to a path of healing, even after the fact.

Thich writes:

“Another veteran told us that almost everyone in his platoon had been killed by the guerillas. Those who survived were so angry that they baked cookies with explosives in them and left them alongside the road. When some Vietnamese children saw them, they ate the cookies, and the explosives went off. They were rolling around the ground in pain. Their parents tried to save their lives, but there was nothing they could do. That image of the children rolling on the ground, dying because of the explosives in the cookies, was so deeply ingrained on this veteran’s heart, that now, twenty years later, he still could not sit in the same room with children. He was living in hell.

After he had told this story, I gave him the practice of Beginning Anew.

Beginning Anew is not easy. We have to transform our hearts and our minds in very practical ways. We may feel ashamed, but shame is not enough to change our heart. I said to him, “You killed five or six children that day? Can you save the lives of five or six families today? Children everywhere in the world are dying because of war, malnutrition, and disease. You keep thinking about the five or six children that you killed in the past, but what about the children who are dying now? You still have your body, you still have your heart, you can do many things to help children who are dying in the present moment. Please give rise to your mind of love, and in the months and years that are left to you, do the work of helping children.” He agreed to do it, and it has helped him transform his guilt.
—Thich Nhat Hanh

That story is tough, but it is a practice that all of us can do–for ourselves and for each other. Imagine a different kind of Memorial Day, when we celebrate the end of all war and the beginning anew of cooperation, support and peace.

*Reprinted with permission in The Power of Compassion: Stories that Open the Heart, Heal the Soul. and Change the World (Hampton Roads, 2010).

NEW CD Just Released! May 28, 2010

Excited to see and hear my new CD hot off the press: BuddhaHeart: Chants for Love, Healing and Enlightenment. It’s a beautiful companion to my new book THE POWER OF COMPASSION: Stories that Open the Heart, Heal the Soul and Change the World.  Based on Tibetan chants, the tunes themselves are original and the meaning behind the words are universal.  Inspired by my work as a sound healer, I wanted to create an aural environment that would inspire a meditative state of mind. Many people have said my tones have brought them healing and peace on deep levels.  You can check out one example on my website under BuddhaHeart at http://www.BooksbyPamelaBloom.com.

The CD is available for purchase on Amazon.com HERE:

His Holiness the Dalai Lama: Transforming the Despicable May 20, 2010

In honor of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s four days of teaching at Radio City Music Hall, May 20-23, 2010, I’d like to share a story of his that appears in my new book THE POWER OF COMPASSION: Stories that Open the Heart, Heal the Soul, and Change the World (Hampton Roads, 2010).  In this passage, His Holiness talks about his visit to Auschwitz in a way that can help us reconsider  how to face horrific occurrences and turn them into positive acts.

On the TODAY show this morning, His Holiness told Ann Curry, that without a doubt, human beings were becoming more compassionate–just witness how much world influence has come about in response to natural disasters in Haiti, Chile, and other places around the world. And rather than pointing out the lack of world help in the recent earthquake in Tibet, His Holiness chose to accentuate the positive and turn the hearts and minds of human beings to their true nature–compassion. THAT is an inspiring leader!  The story below provides a poignant glimpse into how his mind and heart works.
“On a trip to Europe, I took the opportunity to visit the site of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Even thoughI had heard and read a great deal about the place, I found myself completely unprepared for the experience. My initial reaction to the sight of the ovens in which hundreds of thousands of human beings were burned was one of total revulsion. I was dumbfounded at the
sheer calculation and detachment from feeling to which they bore horrifying testimony.

“Then, in the museum which forms part of the visitor centre, I saw a collection of shoes. A lot of them were patched or small, having obviously belonged to children and poor people. This saddened me particularly. What could they have possibly done, what harm? I stopped and prayed—moved profoundly both for the victims and for the perpetrators of this calamity—that such a thing would never happen again. And, in the knowledge that, just as we all have the capacity to act selflessly out of concern for others’ well-being, so do we all have the potential to be murderers and torturers, I vowed to do all I could to ensure that nothing like this happened again.”

—His Holiness the Dalai Lama,
from Ethics for the New Millennium, reprinted in THE POWER OF COMPASSION: Stories that Open the Heart, Heal the Soul, and Change the World (Hampton Roads, 2010)

The Mother of Compassion May 9, 2010

It’s Mother’s Day and I just remembered a stellar story about the extreme power of a mother’s love that can be found in my new book THE POWER OF COMPASSION: Stories that Open the Heart, Heal the Soul & Change the World. Khenpo Tsewang Gyatso, a very respected lama and scholar in the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, was kind enough to tell me this highly intimate story about the moment his heart opened to the buddhist teachings of compassion. The story is heart-wrenching and the image it will leave behind in your psyche, indelible..

From “The Power of Compassion”:

When I was three or four years old, Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö, one of the great Tibetan masters of the past century, came to our village in Eastern Tibet on a pilgrimage because there were a lot of sacred caves in the area. When my family and I went to visit him, he bestowed upon me my present name and told my mother in private to take care of me because one day I might become of great benefit to others. As such, my family thought I should go to a monastery. I also had the feeling from a very young age that I wanted to be a monk. My mother used to tell me stories about how I would dress up in robes at the age of two and do lama dances [spontaneous sacred dancing done only by masters]. After we left Tibet and I was enrolled in the Darjeeling School in India, a very high lama came to my class one day and asked who wanted to be a monk. I ran right up to the front without any hesitation.

I began my Buddhist studies at around fifteen years of age. In the next two or three years I often heard the power of compassion teaching that you should treat every sentient being as your parent, but to tell you the truth I didn’t have any feeling for it. It was only a concept until one day when I heard the following story.

Before he became a master, Khenpo Shenga was a bandit who had spent his whole life, up to the time he was about thirty-five years old, robbing and killing people. One day he incurred the wrath of another group of bandits, who wanted his head and began to chase him. Running beside the horse he was escaping on was his beloved, beautiful mare, who also happened to have a baby growing in her stomach. Because she was pregnant she couldn’t run fast, and although he loved the horse very much, his pride simply would not allow this beautiful specimen of a horse to fall into the hands of other bandits. So making a critical decision, he whipped out his sword and hit the mare on the backside, practically slicing her in two. She fell to the ground, stricken, and the baby horse came out. But even though the mare was practically in two pieces, stillshe was moving her head toward her prematurely born baby to see if it was all right. At that moment, Khenpo Shenga deeply grasped what it meant to be a parent, what it meant to be a mother, and his heart cracked open. On the spot he abandoned his wild ways and went off to look for a master. It is said that after this he then just skated through the practices and evolved quickly into a very great master who came to benefit many others.

When I heard this story it touched me deeply. It helped me understand what it means to recognize that all sentient beings have been your mother in some lifetime and how much gratitude one must feel for the love and affection they have given you. Like Khenpo Shenga, I saw that no matter how much suffering a mother goes through, still, the inclination to take care of one’s baby is so deep, so ingrained into her being. Therefore it makes great sense to work for the benefit of all beings and treat them all as your parent. In its humble way this story completely changed my life and practice.

—Khenpo Tsewang Gyatso, in THE POWER OF COMPASSION: Stories that Open the Heart, Heal the Soul & Change the World (Hampton Roads, 2010), compiled and edited by Pamela Bloom

May your heart today remember the deep surrender to life and death your mother offered to bring you into this world….may she and all mothers everywhere be blessed.

The Writers Are Present: Satsang at MOMA May 9, 2010

I just had the delightful unexpected pleasure of spending the day In Manhattan with Britain’s’ finest, Isabel Losada, best-selling author of such spiritual books as A Beginner’s Guide to Changing the World and The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment. Our first time to meet in person, we are both back-cover endorsers of the just-released  Breath of the Absolute, by the spiritual teacher known as Mooji. First encounters between authors from similar genres can sometimes turn out to be literary social nightmares, but to my relief, Isabel proved herself to be perky, nonstop perceptive, and refreshingly funny. Over the longest hang-date I’ve shared with anyone in the last ten years, we discovered our experiences as writers on the spiritual circuit had amazing coincidences and spine-tingling similarities.

Perhaps it was fitting that we started our Manhattan spree at the provocative MOMA show titled “The Artist Is Present” by the Yugoslav performance artist Marina Abramovic. The actual artist is present all day, first encountered on the mezzanine of the museum, clad in a white goddess gown, sitting opposite a young man, their palms facing up on their knees. Anyone who has sat in the presence of a great master, or even in a simple yoga class, would immediately recognize the pose–present, alert, still–two people seemingly, intimately, staring into each other’s souls. Roped off in a large frame, the scene was apparently meant to inspire a sacred sense of space between two beings. But I immediately became more intrigued with Isabel, who in two seconds, had effortlessly entwined her arms underneath those of a dour-looking security guard, immediately extracting essential museum information, all the while making him laugh and transforming his mood.

So much for Brits not being spontaneous or cozy!

We then moved to the rest of the exhibit on the 6th floor, where we were immediately confronted with both still and moving snippets from Abramovic’s mind–photos of her enacting rituals using her naked body, videos of her dressed in folkloric costume fondling her exposed breasts, tables of instruments that appeared to depict torture. And then there was the intimacy test: a live nude couple blocking a doorway, between whose air space you had to walk through to reach the inner room. (Of course, there was another option for the faint-hearted, but being two writers, Isabel and I had to confront this conundrum head on!) The amount of space between the couple had been cunningly designed to be so small that you could not avoid grazing the couple’s intimate body parts as you passed through. For a few minutes, Isabel and I simply watched as others rushed by, all of them, as Isabel noted, facing the woman. As I finally slinked through, facing the young man, his eyes unexpectedly lit up, and I found, to my absolute horror, the following words escaping my lips: “Oh, I’m sorry!” Wow–kudos to the Artist–who has created a brilliant setup for the viewer to experience his or her own projections regarding interrupting the personal space of others. (Oh my goodness,  was that shades of Mommy and Daddy while being conceived then coming out of the womb?!?!)

The daughter of two military heroes and the great-niece of a Serbian Orthodox priest who was later sainted, Abramovic had made it her life work to pitch herself into the most extreme conditions of the Witness: the horror of her own personal and cultural obsessions, the fearless breaking of conventions, the stripping of the human body down to its skeletal form,; much of the show has to do with the entangled ways we connect with each other’s psyches. Indeed, one project featured a live nude woman in prone position, with a skeleton entwined on her body.  Even more searing was a video of the Artist, fully clothed watching her former partner (a very handsome man), totally nude and strapped up in wires, continually running forward and hitting himself against an invisible wall. Through his repetitive self-inflicted suffering, bound by his own limitations, the Artist as Abramovic remains passive, yet alert. The effect reminded me of scenes from the Japanese movie Kagemusha, where the tribal warrior sits silent and unflinching before horrifying scenes of war. In both–the immovable, impenetrable Witness remains impervious to pain.

Yet the show is not without deeper spiritual references. Indeed, one art project reminded me of the inner meanings of a Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana ritual, and tucked into a corner was the photograph of a powerful Tibetan master, clad in traditional garb, (probably from pre-exile Tibet). The most stunning piece for me was a video of the Artist dressed in peasant black, apparently in an abandoned, bombed-out kitchen, holding a tin of milk about to overflow. Abramovic’s immaculate presence, her meticulous attention, her “still life” in the face of imminent loss from one false step, was simply and purely astonishingly beautiful.

Yet, after an hour and a half, Isabel and I were screaming for sunshine and fresh air, trees and cappuccino. My meditative practice for 30 years has partly been about developing this Witness, and Abramovic did show that activity with a courage and fearlessness and uncompromising revelation of body and soul that’s rarely been seen. But as Isabel and I escaped to Central Park and let the perfect spring sun and our newfound friendship penetrate our souls, I realized there was for me something essential missing in Abramovic’s work (though in truth it might not be fair to point out).  Put a great master who truly transmits energy through his or her presence, like Amma, or Mother Meera, or the Dalai Lama, or Mooji, and a different vibration would have arisen out of that space. Indeed, it has been true for both Isabel and myself that in the presence of such masters one’s heart spontaneously opens and there is no need to search for meaning, definition or proof.

Without a doubt the Artist was present in this important, provocative, soul-unsettling exhibition. In fact I would even recommend it for a certain type of viewer looking for an eye-opening experience. But it left with me the same feeling I had after viewing the movie Pan’s Labyrinth, a visually imaginative and allegorical take on the fears a little girl  faced in Spain during World War II.

I left the theater, like this exhibition, craving for Light. And soul. And connection.

“The Artist is Present,” however, did leave me with something much more valuable than the price of its ticket–a newfound awareness (dare I even say, conviction) that there IS something beyond the Artist simply being Present that is more important and real.

Something unnameable, something of Love, where both the Artist and the viewer disappear, and only Presence remains.

Something, in fact, which from many different angles, my new book The Power of Compassion, humbly tries to address. As does Mooji’s books, Before I Am and Breath of the Absolute.

Though, in truth, it may be something (or better put, nothing) which is found neither in a book or museums.

With much gratitude for Isabel’s presence, light and compassion…and for those of the masters…