An update on Spiritual Warrior post from last week about Kilian:
Perfect, connected, aligned, Universal timing, Kilian found his way out of the remote farm he calls home and rocked up at my guesthouse today to “deal with Thai government stuff”. Read = extend his Thai visa. Ding, ding, ding! Bells went off in my mind. Today is the day I also needed to extend my visa; it was the final day of my visa. Every day overstaying, the fine is 500 Bhat per day ($16). Whoops, missed that one. Kilian is here to snap me out of higher consciousness work and draw me back onto the material realm, remind me I must deal with this mundane but necessary task. This means mucho dinero por mua if I don’t take care of this tomorrow. I have been so wrapped up making a short film to document the ceremony blessing of PRAY talismans this past weekend in Chiang Mai, I barely know what day it is let alone how many days are left on my visa. Last year after a government rule change, I overstayed my Thai visa by 2 weeks and owed the Thai government $300. Double whoops; made my flight to India within minutes. It was a good thing I sold goddess headpieces and malas to gorgeous goddesses on the beach and in the jungle during my stay.
Vibration completely aligned, Kilian was at
Giant House when I arrived home from another 12-hour day of video editing,
writing, social media and spreading the good word about PRAY energies. Making the most of the rare opportunity to
spend time with this fierce being, I jammed with Kilian for a bit and shared
with him reactions to the blog entry I wrote last week. One of my male friends said he could
literally reach out and touch Kilian and hopes to meet him one day. Kilian, in his down-to-earth, sarcastic way,
asked if my friend was gay. He’s
not.
Opinionated yet backed with solid knowledge, Kilian agreed with everything I wrote, appreciated my perspective, except his being likened
to a warrior. His definition of a
warrior is someone who fights, who uses fire, wherein there is inherently a
struggle. Perhaps there is some truth to
this. Different variation of the Sanskrit origins
help us see where Zen Buddhists have drawn the term Peaceful Warrior, which
Kilian believes to be a complete contradiction. In Buddhism, a bodhisattva (Sanskrit: बोधिसत्त्व bodhisattva; Pali: बोधिसत्त bodhisatta) is often interchanged with the term warrior. Bodhi means
enlightenment; sattva means
enlightenment-being; and satva can be
translated as heroic-minded one. For
many years now, Pema Chodron, a modern-day bodhisattva, has been one of my
guides. I have turned to her books in
the darkest of times: “When Things Fall Apart”, “Comfortable with Uncertainty”,
“No Time to Lose”, “Start Where You Are”, “Awakening Lovingkindness”. Simple ideas, powerful in times of chaos and major
upheaval.
For myself, often times of great upheaval are when my body fails me, when my autoimmune dis-order kicks into overdrive and I no longer have control. During one significant transition in my life, I understandably ended up in bed for days on end with a fever of 104 degrees. The five-year relationship, the backbone of support in my life during personal transformation, had ended just a month prior. The home I knew for the previous 2 & ½ years with my partner, the most consistent home I had experienced for years, was a distant memory. I was living in a stranger’s extravagant, yet foreign home. Experiencing for the first time, maybe ever in my life, what it felt to be truly alone. Me, myself, and a high fever. By this time I had been practicing yoga and working with other healing modalities long enough to understand on a higher level that the fever was a symptom, to not take my experience personally.
I picked up
Pema Chodron’s book, “When Things Fall Apart” and read. It was about all I could do. Her words soothed me. Nothing can really change the pain of a fever
that high. Breaking the fever
momentarily, pain medicine, hot water, cold water, music, TV, there is no
escaping this sort of pain. I have
experienced pain of this severity since the age of one. Extended periods of time, every month,
unforgivable and excruciating every time. Pema, this peaceful warrior was one of my
first exposures into mindfulness. Well,
my first real introduction to mindfulness techniques began in graduate school
but they did not hold the same meaning and power as they did later down the
line. Hitting her own bottom, Pema
became a monk when everything in her world fell apart. It was in the deepest, darkest moment that
Pema let go, accepted what was without judgment, and stepped onto the path of a
shaman, a warrior. One perspective is
that we struggle, and this struggle leads us onto the path of a peaceful
warrior. The other perspective is the
Zen perspective, more similar to Kilian’s take.
Simply let go, no longer attempt to hold together a reality that does
not work. All of it is really the same,
two sides of the same coin. Path of
least resistance yet on it there is courage, intention, truth, purpose and
strength. This, I believe, is the path
of modern-day peaceful warriors. 
For many like
myself, it is only the dark, chaotic struggle and fight that shows us the way
to the path of the bodhisattva path. To
be with what is. It is in deep pain that
I have been able to separate “self” from “experience”, have out-of-body
experiences and detach from the pain, observe it, while at times still tap in
and experience it with non-judgment. The
struggle doesn’t end once on the path. I
still have pain at times, still have fevers.
But I am much more adept at handling it when it happens. Pain is pain is pain, but my mind, energy
lines, perspective are not what they were 8 years ago when I first read Pema’s
words of wisdom. I now sit in a seat of
my own experience and wisdom of dealing with what is.~ A couple Kilian stories to close with ~
I was eating durian,
one of my favorite fruits, at the table while Kilian and I discussed warrior-ism
and his blog article. His appreciation
for my durian tastes led to a tale about Jackfruit hunting on the farm in the
jungle. Kilian recounts his tale wearing
the very same L.A. hipster-style outfit I saw him in last time. I’m pretty sure he does not have another
outfit. His pants are so torn they are
held together with safety pins. I’m not
sure if he knows a new pair of pants costs 100 Bhat ($3) at the thrift store,
or if he wears these on principle. Today
he had a hip new black and white checked scarf draped around his head making him
look like an endearing hippy.
One of the
monks on Kilian’s farm sent him on a jackfruit-hunting mission one day. The monk explained to him precisely how to
choose the correct fruit, a ginormous treat reaching as large as 36” long, 20”
in diameter, and 80 pounds in weight.
With specific instructions and proper jackfruit picking tools, Kilian
set out into the jungle. The monk had
armed Kilian with a long, thick stick to poke the large fruit and draw pieces
close to him for smell testing. He was
also handed a machete so he could chop down the treasured jackfruit find. Jackfruit does not grow on the ground. They grow on trees. It’s a good thing Kilian must do everything
himself and was keen to climb the jackfruit tree with the help of a couple friends. Kilian had climbed a good 10-15 feet off the
ground on the jackfruit tree. He
described holding the machete in one hand, a stick in the other, for perfect
jackfruit-picking technique. Laughing
yet quite serious, he said he could barely hold onto the tree because of the
tools in his hand. To make the task a
bit more challenging, he of course had to bend over and smell each jackfruit to
check if they were worthy of picking. As
Kilian described this scene to me in the middle of the guesthouse common area,
he stands up, laughing, bends over, crouches uncomfortably over the ground as
if he were sniffing something to demonstrate this impossibly ridiculous task. In his uncanny sweet yet serious voice, Kilian
proclaims, “I nearly died that day picking jackfruits, haha”.
Kilian is
compelled to do everything himself. Pick
his own fruit, melt metals, make glue, fix shoes, farm his own food, live off
the land. He is not satisfied if someone
does something for him. He is Shiva,
creator of divine origins like none I have ever met. So determined to live in a way that is
authentic to him, Kilian is an unstoppable force. Connecting with Kilian in this moment,
listening to his story, again inspired by this man, I came to a halt. All my silliness, all the stories in my head,
in my world, narrowed to a pinprick and for that moment did not matter. I was able to step out of myself and be there
with Kilian, and laugh at the Universe and his place in it. Having a really good, deep, genuine belly
laugh, I stopped there and listened for a while to his stories. He reminded me about the truly magical people
out here, walking paths of truth, making imprints in the world and impacting
others’ lives whether they mean to or not, whether they wish to be labeled “peaceful
warriors” or not.
On his farm,
with Killian live volunteers and monks.
One of the rules of monkhood is no touching women. One of the four-noble truths, a life of
non-attachment in deemed necessary in order to become awakened. For monks this includes non-attachment to
intimate relationships. I can only
imagine the struggle that this life of austerity is fraught with at all
moments; for this is the point. Well,
one of the monks on Kilian’s farm seems to have encountered a slight problem;
he’s in love <3. Not only is he in
love, Kilian shared that the monk has been passing love letters to his
adored. The monk also recently opened a Facebook
account, using a picture of Kilian passing out rice, as his profile picture. Sounds as though this kind man is making
steps to connect with the world. Who can
blame him? One of the love letters that
the monk (I know his name but will refrain from sharing out of respect) wrote
said, ”I don’t know if you believe in angels but I
do and if u want to see one look in the mirror”. As my friend and I listened to these precious
words, in Kilian’s gentle way, we gushed. “AAaawwwwww,” both of us cooed at the same
time, gooey-eyed, hands together in prayer, knees clenched, on the edges of our
seats waiting for more juicy letters the monk wrote to his beloved. Kilian just laughed back at us.
