The Real Reason I’m Going to Japan
There are a lot of ordinary reasons I want to go to Japan. Its intrigue is vast: food, art, culture, people, manga, tea ceremony, Shinto shrines. It’s so diametrically different than my home country yet so dear and familiar. I’ve never been and, still, I have no doubt that I’ll love it.
All that said, why now? Why live there? Why not just visit? Don’t you want to finally be fluent in Spanish? Why don’t you go to Spain or South America? Doesn’t South Korea pay English teachers better? Aren’t China and Southeast Asian countries cheaper? Japan is so expensive!
A little backstory . . .
Since 2014, I have been a student of Shambhavi Sarasvati, spiritual director of Jaya Kula, a community of about 60 people learning and practicing in Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen, two ancient traditions from India and Tibet, respectively.
Every January, Shambhavi announces a theme for the new year that serves as a kind of touchstone on which to contemplate and work with our various human tensions. This year’s theme was a call to action: share our devotion more openly. Devotion to what? I hesitate to say “God” because that can mean different things to different people. So, I’ll just say Wisdom with a capital “W”.
This was a nice dovetail from last year’s theme, which was pride, as in our constant defense, deflection, and attack to protect whatever self-identity we have formed at the expense of intimacy and open-heartedness. I say it’s a nice dovetail because pride is undoubtedly what has kept me from fully expressing my mystical side, a.k.a., my devotion, to the more secular folks in my life.
My deepest desire has always been to be used: to be in a position in which every gift I came here with could be used fully to support what I recognized early on as primordial goodness. Yet even with this unstoppable desire, I found that my engrained habit of seeking admiration was standing in my way.
Whatever we give, to whatever extent we are giving to support our own self-image, that is precisely the extent to which we are denying benefit to others.
– Shambhavi Sarasvati | https://jayakula.org/message-about-pride/
Self-image is a big one for me. Being from the South or maybe from the East Coast or the suburbs, it hasn’t felt totally safe to let my spiritual freak flag fly. I have often felt dorky sharing my metaphysical musings openly and sincerely, without disclaimers or self-deprecation. I’m a slightly older than the millennial Harry Potter generation who seem to have no problem mixing crystals and business. Good on’m!
Even though I was raised Jewish (summer camp, Bat Mitzvah, youth group, Hebrew school, Israel, the whole thing) I somehow internalized that there are things far more important, valuable, and even “real” than having a relationship with Wisdom. I learned that there is only one (unrelatable) way to relate to God, that God used to talk to people but stopped some thousands of years back and He’s more apt to shame than console. In short, magic doesn’t exist; it’s just a plot device to tell the story of Passover, Purim, Yom Kippur, etc., so that we can glean life lessons and have a reason to get together and eat. Those who feel more deeply about it should go to rabbinical school or whatever.
Nevertheless, my childhood was filled with mystical inclinations. I used to read messages on the wall of my bedroom at night made by shadows of my stuffed animals. Sometimes, I would sneak out of my house in the middle of the night and meet my neighborhood friends to ritually bury little household knickknacks for who-knows-what reason. As I got older, I tucked this side of myself away. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It just gradually got usurped by the circles I found myself in.
Living on the west coast for a stint in my 30s was a real game changer for me. In the Bay Area and Portland, OR, guided shamanic drum journeys to find one’s ancestral patronus were as routine as Sunday brunch. When I eventually returned to the east coast (I now live in Maine), I carried this spiritual normalization with me and never went back to apologizing for or withholding my woowoo proclivities.
We compartmentalize, Shambhavi says, and it keeps us from fully embodying what we learn on the meditation cushion and in teachings. We’re one person at home and another at work or at the grocery store. How relaxing would it be, and even beneficial to others, if we were our whole selves all of the time?
If this year is about sharing our devotion more openly, here is my crack at it. The story of why I am going to Japan is a story of devotion.
One discipline Shambhavi affirms with utter confidence is divination, the ancient practice of connecting with Wisdom to gain insight into a situation. Every culture has some version of this. It’s usually done through some kind of tool or visual. There is the Turkish practice of reading coffee grounds. Osteomancy is the reading of bones. Some read the flight patterns of birds. Maybe you played around with a Ouija board as a kid. (Or you read the shadows of your stuffed animals on your bedroom wall at night, in which case, we need to talk.)
The form of divination that Shambhavi teaches is the Zhouyi, which is an ancient pre-Confucian Chinese text that predates the I Ching. She learned how to interpret the Zhouyi from Liu Ming who wrote the translation of the text she uses to divine. It’s a rare treat to have a direct line to this type of teacher and I’m incredibly grateful.
By the time I had found Jaya Kula, I had been reading tarot cards for many years and had cultivated a relationship with the I Ching. Still, there was a part of me that didn’t totally take it, or myself, seriously. I saw it as a helpful activity for obtaining some clarity and enhancing understanding of a circumstance, but I would often double check the results with a friend or keep asking the oracle the same question until I got the answer I wanted. Rookie move.
There are no confusing divinations, only confused diviners.
Shambhavi is not remotely airy fairy. She has a fancy PhD and was a professor at Northwestern University. She has 35 years of spiritual practice (meditation, etc.) under her belt. Her feet are on the ground. Her voice is sturdy. Her look is stern. (She doesn’t agree with me on that last one.)
When Shambhavi says divination is real, I feel it in my bones. I relax and abide. When it comes to this discipline, there is one thing she gravely admonishes: treating a divined answer as advice among other avenues of advice. Basically, if you’re not going to follow the divination, don’t bother doing it.
Of course, to have this level of confidence in the oracle, you have to be a skilled diviner. “There are no confusing divinations, only confused diviners,” she says. I have a ways to go before can completely count on my own interpretations of the text. For big life decisions, I often go to her directly for a reading. However, the more I practice, the clearer it gets.
Divination teaches us about timing. We are tiny specks in the multiverse with very little vantage on how our decisions affect our individual lives, let alone the cosmos.
The various forms of divination are languages which the less wise (aka us) use to speak directly to primordial awareness showing up as ancestors, wisdom teachers, or in no form at all. The diviner is one who understands the language of a particular method of divination intimately and can use it to talk, in a real way, to living, primordial wisdom.
Some people think of divination as fortune telling or prediction, but this is an impoverished view. The more profound and accurate orientation toward divination is that it teaches you how to use your freedom now to make choices and adapt skillfully to life’s ever-changing circumstances. By doing so, you create more freedom and spaciousness in your life going forward.
— Shambhavi Sarasvati | https://jayakula.org/divination/
Now, I lean in to divination more wholeheartedly. From decisions around jobs, to men, to moves, it has yet to fail me.
Cut to last summer. . .
In June of 2018, Shambhavi announced that she would be relocating Jaya Kula headquarters, currently in Portland, ME, to the Bay Area, CA the following summer (2019). This was not exciting news for me. I felt done with my time on the west coast for a variety of reasons, but my then-partner was an integral part of the community and he was definitely going along. So, I resigned myself to follow.
In August, (totally unrelated) my friend Alice told me that one of her good friends was hosting a woman named Silvia Calisaya, an Aymara healer and spiritual guide from Peru. Silvia was coming to Maine in September to speak about her journey and the heritage of her people. Alice asked me if I’d like to book a healing session and reading with her. I had no idea what to expect, but I was 100% in.
That September, my partner and I broke up.
The next morning, I found myself on my meditation cushion realizing in a bittersweet flash that I was free. Being in my mid-thirties, having children with this person had felt both urgent and steeped in conflicting desires. He is not much of a traveler. In my heart of hearts, I worried that having children with him would also mean never having the chance to go abroad for an extended period of time. As I sat in front of my altar that morning, that fear floated away. I could do whatever I wanted. I never had the chance to do a long-term study abroad in college. Better late than never, I thought.
Still, I had mixed feelings about missing out on this new adventure to California with my second family. Jaya Kula has been a real rock for me over the years. For example, one time I lost my hearing aid while pet sitting due to some very mischievous kitties. At the next satsang, I was a puddle of tears — hearing aids are exorbitantly expensive and I wasn’t in a financial place to replace it. That weekend, not one but SEVEN Jaya Kula buddies came to the house to help me look. We found it in 45 minutes then went out for Chinese food together. I have a lot of great friends, but I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced community quite like this. It felt like a big loss to miss out on continuing the journey with these generous, available, and dependable friends.
Not California.
Later that month, I drove to a lovely craftsman home in a residential area of Portland, ME to see Silvia, the Peruvian shaman. Marilynn, the effervescent host and owner of the home, greeted me at the door and invited me in for tea while I waited for Silvia’s current session to end. When it was time, I ascended the stairs, filled with curious anticipation.
Silvia’s husband was acting as her assistant and warmly welcomed me to enter the room where she awaited. I don’t recall our entire conversation, but one of the first things she said to me when I sat down was, “You’ve been deciding to go somewhere and you keep undeciding. You need to decide and you need to go.” How did she know?! “I am willing to go anywhere,” I said, “but where? My spiritual community is going to California. Do I follow them? Or do I go to another country like I’ve been dreaming of doing?”
She nodded and grasped a handful of coca leaves that were laying on the beautiful, brightly colored pink and orange cloth on the table in front of her. She threw the leaves onto the cloth and started to piece and sort through them, picking them up one at a time and examining each leaf fully. Then, she said unflinchingly “Not California.”
I felt immediate relief, which was a divination in and of itself. For the first time since Shambhavi announced the move, my California FOMO melted away and I was able to get clear about my real desire. I wanted to live in another country. “But where?” I said. “Where are you thinking about?” she answered.
I had a number of places in mind. I had always wanted to spend time in Southeast Asia. Spain was on my list because I took Spanish in high school and college and I wanted to finally solidify fluency. South Korea and China are known for paying English teachers well. Truthfully, Japan has always been my number one bucket list travel fantasy but the cost of living felt prohibitive.
Country by country, she threw the leaves. Not Southeast Asia. Not South Korea. Maybe Spain.
“Japan,” she said. “Spain would be fine, too. But Japan would be best.”
Silvia and her husband said prayers to bless my trip and gave me a ritual to perform before and after the journey to ensure success. We hugged and I thanked them both profusely.
And that was that. Wisdom had spoken. Who was I to question?
After that, I immediately began to set my Japan plans in motion, using the divination techniques I’m learning from Shambhavi every step of the way — deciding which English teaching programs to apply to, which interviews to accept, which to postpone, when to leave, what city to request for placement. Every move I make is guided by Wisdom. I “let go and let God” to the best of my ability. It’s my non-Christian version of “Jesus, take the wheel.” (Take it away, Carrie Underwood!)
This is how I talk to God. In my world, magic and practicality are not mutually exclusive. They are, in fact, symbiotic.
The real reason I’m going to Japan is because Wisdom said so and that’s how I roll.
Originally published at rebeccainjapan.home.blog on March 11, 2019.
