yes Corboy, that is an interesting article.
on her website, www.umaa.info she has written the following... context --> about --> 'pinch of salt' - I would love people's opinion of it. I think there are so many strange things here...
------
Warning: I am about to talk about me.
If it is unconscionable to you that a person you think is supposed to be spiritual still wields a charismatic sense of "I-ness" or ego that aims to dissect, divide, compare, judge, make emphatic points and loudly tell tales about hers-truly—and tall-seeming ones at that—then this page may be indigestible and unnecessary for you to read beyond this point.
About me:
Almost 30 years ago, my teacher warned me that for as many people who truly loved him, ten more would truly hate him.
Indeed, we were banished at the door of our coconut-wire island's world-renowned parties. Dressed-down in ashes and dust and unbefitting for the dressing-up, we were summarily dismissed as social pariahs and commonly reviled by those in the "know" as the uninvited ungodly and his minion.
Reviled by whom, commonly? Dismissed by whom, conclusively? Who is the devil chaser? Who is the accuser? Who is the character assassin? Who is the witch burner? Who is the cult buster?
Who points, hammers and screws harder their sharp-ass finger like a nail to a crucifix to gleefully shame their "shammer"? Who righteously rouses a rabble to bear down and eke blood from a stone to abuse their "abuser"? Who overrules the un-godly? Who salivates at the prospect of a mobbing? Who appropriates a one-path sanction to terrorise the inconvertible "heathen"? Who is self-congratulatory as the profiteer of victimhood? Who lands the villain role and who is villain-ous? Who created whom?
Who am I?
As you can see I am someone who asks a lot of questions when not being pursued by answers. This pursuit brought me to live as my former guru's resigned captive for years in a bamboo and stone hut precariously perched on the slippery slope of a ravine. Un-restrained by the mores that grant passage and position in socialised rings, the labour-pains of an uncommon love trained me to face future prospects as a greatful, conscious, convertible outcast.
To some of my pale-eyed detractors, I am not even worthy of being a noble savage. I am for them far worse than that: The dramatic woman. The angry woman. The unreasonable woman. The psychotic woman.
I have been watching and asking.
Over the years, I have come to define a "they" by their own determination to be so. Why? "They" have said they get stronger against me. In them I see collective tendencies recognisable because they are repeating and because I do remember the “crack-hit” of temporary power derived from deviance. Virulent deviation from their essential nature is clearly the power-monger's choice.
I am vilified by those harbouring hurt on the fringe. I am punished by those in self-imposed exile for leaving them out. I am accused of having magical powers to seduce and bind people into worship of me as the one and only overriding source of their awakening. Many assume, without due diligence, that I have garnered these powers for power’s sake in satanic or erotico-spiritual rituals. Indeed I have dug deep into my repositories through ritual. And what I am here to say is that any powers that I am imbued with by being true, are in circulation by offering my truth, not by corrupting another's.
I am powered through my offering—offering the unconditioned from me, through me, as me, back to source. Me is the key. My me and your me are key. Our god-given "egos" in service to true nature are no less than magnificent and conspiratorially down-played.
If people see my face and body powering through their bodies in high-def, multi-dimensional veracity, and they raise me up in exaltation, I am researching with them the unique signature, traditional function and peculiarity of this. By my punishers I am accused of taking advantage of people's ignorance and wrongly endorsing this oddly shared view that I am somehow the source of someone's awakening.
They admonish me in disgust and won’t fathom why I am not doing the "right" spiritual thing by saying, "No, it’s all you. It is not me. I am not special and we are all the same".
Why do the "right" thing when clearly there is something underfoot that is worth a full-blown investigation by volunteering participants who are not invested in being perceived as right or spiritual? Their choices are not governed by the understandable need to be perceived as happily and successfully established on the path to enlightenment with a certifiable guru, in order to feel safely validated by a seemingly spiritual community. They are choosing to experiment together and play out their natural parts of a bizarre, unexpected and yet so-very-familiar tale—a tale that has been spoken in tongues in small and strange gatherings for eons.
To my self-appointed superiors, my motion to growl—and yes, I growl, hiss, purr and rumble— has been predictably minimised as an emotional outburst. "It will pass," they say. "Impure Kundalini ascent," they concur, without allowing or experiencing the "uncontrolled" to overwhelm their controlling survival mechanisms. Sure it will pass, but what happens in the pass-ing, in the in-between? And what if—just what if—they don't actually know for sure beyond a doubt, that this existence is not just a controlled illusion, that it was overpoweringly real all along, and they "missed the forest for the trees"?
I have been told since I was a kid that I have a mouth like a washerwoman, the Grand Canyon and a chatterbox. You may have even heard this from me before. My mouth has been literally washed out with soap. That piece of me that has been told to pipe down and to just say "positive" things is the very thing that transmutes gripe into grace: my motored mouth and the braided voice that plays on my lips.
My motion to speak in the open was once stifled through ridicule (by a woman) as a "Broadway play". When I am not shamed into silence by being told I am so..."dramatic, darling…" detractors get nasty. I am called "honey" in an oil-spill tone. And when "they" really start to lay it on thick, I am called a poor, unheard, "abused little girl".
And their hatred becomes all the more clear the closer they move in to customarily strip me of my "protective layers" for my own "good". They offer me conditional approval in return for certain proof of "vulnerability".
And their coup de grâce: they take it upon themselves to propose in calculated commiseration that I repent and heal myself of the "trauma" of being me. And if I show particular signs of rehabilitation, they cannot help but remark how I am evolving. And if I change my tone as I fall and get up, I am demoted from the spiritual ranking they had originally transferred onto me.
The grand finale is when they team up under the agency of vengeance, hell-bent on "saving" you and your children from the evil misery and damage that they accuse me of doing unto them as they often surmise, without trial, has been done unto me. And way before this point, they have stopped listening and fielding opposing views of the whole truth. It is no longer an apology or resolution they are burning for. It is revenge. And talk of love is poo-pooed as whitewash. And why take a meeting with me when they can rig a good, proper lynching?
Who am I? I am a broken-one, and along every edge of each piece-within-piece is a porous membrane through which the underlying firmament of my absolute faith in absolute love shines forthcoming.
Who am I? Look at the picture. I am a small, brown, middle-aged mother of a son. My life-story is jaw-dropping. Often people don't like that about me: that I am larger than the life they bought into. They want to win. And sometimes they catch themselves admitting that. When I describe my ego as magnificent, they think they caught me red-handed in a punishable act of un-spiritual egoism. I say, “I am godness" and “I am absolute—that which we all are”, and I am threatened with jail for blasphemy.
I tend to hang out with people who have been speaking from the depths long enough that they can outpour together as one limitless mind with a multiverse of view and voice equally represented. They care less whether I am certifiably enlightened.
We coalesce purely because we resonate.
Their lines of vision become cutting enough to define their view clearly, without smudging the edges to protect each other from the blade of their truth. Each of their responses become more sensitively based in self-nurtured consideration for themselves and each other, without compromising integrity of an original, unapologetic deliverance. Each listening with care. Each naturally feeling the penetration of the others’ unguarded reflections deep in their bodies while countering with less of a programmed co-dependency on each others’ self images and projected outcomes. Having co-created an open-door process of self-responsibly dissecting and digesting a backlog of compounded hurts from rejection, punishment, abandonment, violations and loss, there is less pressure to perform "happily", "peacefully" or perfectly. And the magic? Truth as a living force, a serum, a substance, a medicine.
I have served hardily for decades in the field of Tantra, Yoga and Ayurvedic health care.
I don't yet and didn't have an institution, ashram or organised program with systematically scheduled seminars, workshops and trainings. I don't and didn't promise enlightenment or issue spiritual practices with in-house guarantees. I don't and didn't initiate disciples with spiritual names and entrain a way to officiate an expensive, graduated rise in a disciplined, enforceable hierarchy based on my view alone. I don't and didn't block any co-created openings for free, reasonable, progressive debate and discussion. I don't and didn't accept money offered to me without discussing over time the intention, conditions and impact openly with others inside and outside reflecting.
What I do do is warn and provide context in hours and hours of co-created ways to disseminate traditional references and individual and group experiences for anyone who invites himself into my presence. I warn people who pursue me, several times a day, in differing and ever-evolving ways, that I say what I see in intimate relating, and they likely won’t like how I say it and how that feels. And knowing this, all around me have written, spoken and seconded forewarnings that I am thus not for everybody. I remind people that all who come close and choose to stay are volunteering. And the only emphatic requirement for staying: their offered transparency.
Despite and perhaps to spite the warnings, I stand now accused—nay, accursed, some may say. I am vehemently denounced as an unqualified fraud with powers to lead the innocent astray from the true path of enlightenment. I stand accused of being, in combination: invulnerable, in-transparent, in-human, un-yogic, narcissistic, sociopathic; a quack, psycho-spiritual rapist, satanic ritualist, personality-cult-builder, mystical-manipulator, blasphemous Lifton's Law-breaker, black spider-like power sucker; money-demanding, sex-demanding, shaming, Hare Krishna cultist look-a-like.
And I am condemned, without due process, for being apparently guilty of employing enough "specialness" to seemingly control these intelligent, upwardly mobile people and trick them out of their own discernment in a damaging, un-forgivable, un-compassionate, un-spiritually evolved, unacceptably experimental way.
My aggressors are beautiful. You might see them around you. And hear them. They, like me, feel strongly about the freedom of speech. I perceive this as one reason passion awakens inside them for me. Lustily punishing me makes of me a martyr by default whose spoken word vibrates the shifting sands under the platform they raise for my hanging.
There is a Jack Dempsey quote in my Indian notebook: "A champion gets up even when they can’t." I am a magnet for those who want to make sure I can’t get up. Saturn (Shani) does that. He makes sure, time to time, that I can’t get back up. Teacher made sure I couldn't get up. The anti-Uma's, they want to do that.
When it's all for love, I'm down for the fight. You know how it is when a champion stands up: the crowd is divided. There will be those who carry him on their shoulders. And there are those who aspire to challenge the champion for his place. And even those are divided. There are those who earn their belts of jewels, crowns and titles by sheer will, faith and action. And there are those who will threaten the referee, poison the champion, buy the competition and win by perverting reality for the eyes of an audience hungry for enough blood to tip the balance.
I am asked: what do I learn from this? If I could go back and do it over, what would I have done differently? Because of what it was, I can see now what will be, and this to me is more valuable than ruminating on what it should have been when it wasn’t. What will be will be more warnings. More context. Clear disclaimers. More integrating. More pre-preparation, such as holistic psychotherapy with therapists experienced in illuminating the dangers of spiritual transference by westernised seekers of "enlightenment" as a moratorium of suffering, rather than all-pervasive Real-ness as the slow-cooked organic product of experimental, responsive allowance.
I would like to end this page with a call for health. If any of you feel that I have hurt you unjustly, and you want me to know and are open to co-creating with me a reasonable, witnessed or mediated process to acknowledge and digest any confusion, anger and pain, please talk to me. We have an opening.
on her website, www.umaa.info she has written the following... context --> about --> 'pinch of salt' - I would love people's opinion of it. I think there are so many strange things here...
------
Warning: I am about to talk about me.
If it is unconscionable to you that a person you think is supposed to be spiritual still wields a charismatic sense of "I-ness" or ego that aims to dissect, divide, compare, judge, make emphatic points and loudly tell tales about hers-truly—and tall-seeming ones at that—then this page may be indigestible and unnecessary for you to read beyond this point.
About me:
Almost 30 years ago, my teacher warned me that for as many people who truly loved him, ten more would truly hate him.
Indeed, we were banished at the door of our coconut-wire island's world-renowned parties. Dressed-down in ashes and dust and unbefitting for the dressing-up, we were summarily dismissed as social pariahs and commonly reviled by those in the "know" as the uninvited ungodly and his minion.
Reviled by whom, commonly? Dismissed by whom, conclusively? Who is the devil chaser? Who is the accuser? Who is the character assassin? Who is the witch burner? Who is the cult buster?
Who points, hammers and screws harder their sharp-ass finger like a nail to a crucifix to gleefully shame their "shammer"? Who righteously rouses a rabble to bear down and eke blood from a stone to abuse their "abuser"? Who overrules the un-godly? Who salivates at the prospect of a mobbing? Who appropriates a one-path sanction to terrorise the inconvertible "heathen"? Who is self-congratulatory as the profiteer of victimhood? Who lands the villain role and who is villain-ous? Who created whom?
Who am I?
As you can see I am someone who asks a lot of questions when not being pursued by answers. This pursuit brought me to live as my former guru's resigned captive for years in a bamboo and stone hut precariously perched on the slippery slope of a ravine. Un-restrained by the mores that grant passage and position in socialised rings, the labour-pains of an uncommon love trained me to face future prospects as a greatful, conscious, convertible outcast.
To some of my pale-eyed detractors, I am not even worthy of being a noble savage. I am for them far worse than that: The dramatic woman. The angry woman. The unreasonable woman. The psychotic woman.
I have been watching and asking.
Over the years, I have come to define a "they" by their own determination to be so. Why? "They" have said they get stronger against me. In them I see collective tendencies recognisable because they are repeating and because I do remember the “crack-hit” of temporary power derived from deviance. Virulent deviation from their essential nature is clearly the power-monger's choice.
I am vilified by those harbouring hurt on the fringe. I am punished by those in self-imposed exile for leaving them out. I am accused of having magical powers to seduce and bind people into worship of me as the one and only overriding source of their awakening. Many assume, without due diligence, that I have garnered these powers for power’s sake in satanic or erotico-spiritual rituals. Indeed I have dug deep into my repositories through ritual. And what I am here to say is that any powers that I am imbued with by being true, are in circulation by offering my truth, not by corrupting another's.
I am powered through my offering—offering the unconditioned from me, through me, as me, back to source. Me is the key. My me and your me are key. Our god-given "egos" in service to true nature are no less than magnificent and conspiratorially down-played.
If people see my face and body powering through their bodies in high-def, multi-dimensional veracity, and they raise me up in exaltation, I am researching with them the unique signature, traditional function and peculiarity of this. By my punishers I am accused of taking advantage of people's ignorance and wrongly endorsing this oddly shared view that I am somehow the source of someone's awakening.
They admonish me in disgust and won’t fathom why I am not doing the "right" spiritual thing by saying, "No, it’s all you. It is not me. I am not special and we are all the same".
Why do the "right" thing when clearly there is something underfoot that is worth a full-blown investigation by volunteering participants who are not invested in being perceived as right or spiritual? Their choices are not governed by the understandable need to be perceived as happily and successfully established on the path to enlightenment with a certifiable guru, in order to feel safely validated by a seemingly spiritual community. They are choosing to experiment together and play out their natural parts of a bizarre, unexpected and yet so-very-familiar tale—a tale that has been spoken in tongues in small and strange gatherings for eons.
To my self-appointed superiors, my motion to growl—and yes, I growl, hiss, purr and rumble— has been predictably minimised as an emotional outburst. "It will pass," they say. "Impure Kundalini ascent," they concur, without allowing or experiencing the "uncontrolled" to overwhelm their controlling survival mechanisms. Sure it will pass, but what happens in the pass-ing, in the in-between? And what if—just what if—they don't actually know for sure beyond a doubt, that this existence is not just a controlled illusion, that it was overpoweringly real all along, and they "missed the forest for the trees"?
I have been told since I was a kid that I have a mouth like a washerwoman, the Grand Canyon and a chatterbox. You may have even heard this from me before. My mouth has been literally washed out with soap. That piece of me that has been told to pipe down and to just say "positive" things is the very thing that transmutes gripe into grace: my motored mouth and the braided voice that plays on my lips.
My motion to speak in the open was once stifled through ridicule (by a woman) as a "Broadway play". When I am not shamed into silence by being told I am so..."dramatic, darling…" detractors get nasty. I am called "honey" in an oil-spill tone. And when "they" really start to lay it on thick, I am called a poor, unheard, "abused little girl".
And their hatred becomes all the more clear the closer they move in to customarily strip me of my "protective layers" for my own "good". They offer me conditional approval in return for certain proof of "vulnerability".
And their coup de grâce: they take it upon themselves to propose in calculated commiseration that I repent and heal myself of the "trauma" of being me. And if I show particular signs of rehabilitation, they cannot help but remark how I am evolving. And if I change my tone as I fall and get up, I am demoted from the spiritual ranking they had originally transferred onto me.
The grand finale is when they team up under the agency of vengeance, hell-bent on "saving" you and your children from the evil misery and damage that they accuse me of doing unto them as they often surmise, without trial, has been done unto me. And way before this point, they have stopped listening and fielding opposing views of the whole truth. It is no longer an apology or resolution they are burning for. It is revenge. And talk of love is poo-pooed as whitewash. And why take a meeting with me when they can rig a good, proper lynching?
Who am I? I am a broken-one, and along every edge of each piece-within-piece is a porous membrane through which the underlying firmament of my absolute faith in absolute love shines forthcoming.
Who am I? Look at the picture. I am a small, brown, middle-aged mother of a son. My life-story is jaw-dropping. Often people don't like that about me: that I am larger than the life they bought into. They want to win. And sometimes they catch themselves admitting that. When I describe my ego as magnificent, they think they caught me red-handed in a punishable act of un-spiritual egoism. I say, “I am godness" and “I am absolute—that which we all are”, and I am threatened with jail for blasphemy.
I tend to hang out with people who have been speaking from the depths long enough that they can outpour together as one limitless mind with a multiverse of view and voice equally represented. They care less whether I am certifiably enlightened.
We coalesce purely because we resonate.
Their lines of vision become cutting enough to define their view clearly, without smudging the edges to protect each other from the blade of their truth. Each of their responses become more sensitively based in self-nurtured consideration for themselves and each other, without compromising integrity of an original, unapologetic deliverance. Each listening with care. Each naturally feeling the penetration of the others’ unguarded reflections deep in their bodies while countering with less of a programmed co-dependency on each others’ self images and projected outcomes. Having co-created an open-door process of self-responsibly dissecting and digesting a backlog of compounded hurts from rejection, punishment, abandonment, violations and loss, there is less pressure to perform "happily", "peacefully" or perfectly. And the magic? Truth as a living force, a serum, a substance, a medicine.
I have served hardily for decades in the field of Tantra, Yoga and Ayurvedic health care.
I don't yet and didn't have an institution, ashram or organised program with systematically scheduled seminars, workshops and trainings. I don't and didn't promise enlightenment or issue spiritual practices with in-house guarantees. I don't and didn't initiate disciples with spiritual names and entrain a way to officiate an expensive, graduated rise in a disciplined, enforceable hierarchy based on my view alone. I don't and didn't block any co-created openings for free, reasonable, progressive debate and discussion. I don't and didn't accept money offered to me without discussing over time the intention, conditions and impact openly with others inside and outside reflecting.
What I do do is warn and provide context in hours and hours of co-created ways to disseminate traditional references and individual and group experiences for anyone who invites himself into my presence. I warn people who pursue me, several times a day, in differing and ever-evolving ways, that I say what I see in intimate relating, and they likely won’t like how I say it and how that feels. And knowing this, all around me have written, spoken and seconded forewarnings that I am thus not for everybody. I remind people that all who come close and choose to stay are volunteering. And the only emphatic requirement for staying: their offered transparency.
Despite and perhaps to spite the warnings, I stand now accused—nay, accursed, some may say. I am vehemently denounced as an unqualified fraud with powers to lead the innocent astray from the true path of enlightenment. I stand accused of being, in combination: invulnerable, in-transparent, in-human, un-yogic, narcissistic, sociopathic; a quack, psycho-spiritual rapist, satanic ritualist, personality-cult-builder, mystical-manipulator, blasphemous Lifton's Law-breaker, black spider-like power sucker; money-demanding, sex-demanding, shaming, Hare Krishna cultist look-a-like.
And I am condemned, without due process, for being apparently guilty of employing enough "specialness" to seemingly control these intelligent, upwardly mobile people and trick them out of their own discernment in a damaging, un-forgivable, un-compassionate, un-spiritually evolved, unacceptably experimental way.
My aggressors are beautiful. You might see them around you. And hear them. They, like me, feel strongly about the freedom of speech. I perceive this as one reason passion awakens inside them for me. Lustily punishing me makes of me a martyr by default whose spoken word vibrates the shifting sands under the platform they raise for my hanging.
There is a Jack Dempsey quote in my Indian notebook: "A champion gets up even when they can’t." I am a magnet for those who want to make sure I can’t get up. Saturn (Shani) does that. He makes sure, time to time, that I can’t get back up. Teacher made sure I couldn't get up. The anti-Uma's, they want to do that.
When it's all for love, I'm down for the fight. You know how it is when a champion stands up: the crowd is divided. There will be those who carry him on their shoulders. And there are those who aspire to challenge the champion for his place. And even those are divided. There are those who earn their belts of jewels, crowns and titles by sheer will, faith and action. And there are those who will threaten the referee, poison the champion, buy the competition and win by perverting reality for the eyes of an audience hungry for enough blood to tip the balance.
I am asked: what do I learn from this? If I could go back and do it over, what would I have done differently? Because of what it was, I can see now what will be, and this to me is more valuable than ruminating on what it should have been when it wasn’t. What will be will be more warnings. More context. Clear disclaimers. More integrating. More pre-preparation, such as holistic psychotherapy with therapists experienced in illuminating the dangers of spiritual transference by westernised seekers of "enlightenment" as a moratorium of suffering, rather than all-pervasive Real-ness as the slow-cooked organic product of experimental, responsive allowance.
I would like to end this page with a call for health. If any of you feel that I have hurt you unjustly, and you want me to know and are open to co-creating with me a reasonable, witnessed or mediated process to acknowledge and digest any confusion, anger and pain, please talk to me. We have an opening.