Spring Washam - A Fierce Heart
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- Book:A Fierce Heart
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- Publisher:Parallax Press
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- Year:2017
- Rating:3 / 5
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Parallax Press
P.O. Box 7355
Berkeley, California
94707
parallax.org
Parallax Press is the publishing division of
Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, Inc.
Copyright 2017 by Spring Washam
All rights reserved
Cover and text design by Josh Michels
Cover and inset artwork Paul Lewin
Interior illustrations Anna Oneglia
Author photo Nina Omelchenko
Love after Love by Derek Walcott is reprinted by permission of the publisher. The Dakini Speaks and Unconditional by Jennifer Welwood are included courtesy of the poet. To purchase Jennifers collection of spiritual poetry, Poems for the Path, visit jenniferwelwood.com.
Ebook ISBN9781937006778
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
v4.1
a
To the beautiful community at the East Bay Meditation Center.
Your strength, courage, and wisdom have inspired me beyond measure.
Amidst uncertain times, we need strong and inspiring medicine. In A Fierce Heart, you will find this medicine: beautiful teachings and heartfelt stories that can transform your day and change your life. The real purpose of these stories is to awaken and empower you. They will remind you of profound possibilities and provide a sweet, healing balm of wisdom and love for your own difficult and joyful journey.
Told here, Springs personal tale is also universal. Like the most beloved accounts of sages and shamans, ancient lamas and wise mamas, Spring leads us through the trials and revelations of her own life, to show in intimate and personal ways how the mud we are given can give birth to the lotus.
When you meet her in person, Spring Washam is quite lovable, a fountain of joy and caring laughter. She is a dazzling, big-hearted colleague whom I have known since she was young. She is a passionate activist and teacher who blends depth and dedication.
In this beautiful book, Spring gives you her all. But remember, this girl from Long Beach who became the shaman from the Amazon, the yogi from the Himalayas, is not here to entertain you. She means to challenge you! To insist that as you read, you reflect and inquire as she has done:
What is the calling of your own heart?
How fully are you living your own life, this day, this year?
How free is your spirit, how wide is your compassion?
If you were to be more spiritually adventurous, what would that mean?
Have you considered meditation? Would more of it be good for you?
How about shamanic practice, or sacred medicine? Do you find a calling to it?
Are you called to work for justice, to combine it with spiritual courage?
Look more deeply, she asks, because doing so opens the gates to joy and liberation:
Where are you not free?
What limiting beliefs and fears and unhelpful emotions run your days?
What does your body want to tell you?
What has made you stronger?
What are your deepest and most beautiful intentions for the years ahead?
What has love taught you?
Something in you knows there is more to life than just following societys outer focus on money, consumption, and success.
There is a wisdom within you wanting to awaken.
There is a Wise One Who Knows in each of us.
Take time to listen.
Remember, too, honoring the path of awakening is not a one-time process.
Initiations and openings are demanded in every stage of life.
Amidst the 10,000 joys and sorrows of your human incarnation, at this time of both miraculous outer development and widespread injustice, all your courage and wisdom and compassion are needed.
Pause.
Read this book slowly.
Let Springs stories touch you and enliven you.
And then, follow their inspiration.
Let them lead you on your own miraculous journey.
Many blessings as you go!
Jack Kornfield
Spirit Rock Meditation Center, 2017
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
MAYA ANGELOU
M Y VERY FIRST MEMORY is a happy one. My sister and I are sitting on the kitchen counter looking down into our small, rusty toaster. Its a Saturday morning, and were watching cartoons and eating cinnamon toast. For a three-year-old, it doesnt get much better than this. When the toast finally pops, I smother it in butter, sugar, and cinnamon, then joyfully leap back onto our old, green couch. I was so young then, I could never have imagined the twists and turns my life would have in store.
I came into the world on December 26, 1973, at St. Marys County Hospital in Long Beach, California. My birth was not the celebrated, magical moment we all hope for. It was the opposite. My parents relationship, which had always been rocky, completely unraveled during my mothers pregnancy with me. A couple of days after I was born, we moved into a tiny apartment in a large housing complex in Bellflower, California, a low-income neighborhood between east Long Beach and Compton. We were surrounded by gang violence, gunshots, sirens, and helicopters buzzing all night long. My father was in and out of the house during my first three years, and then one day he was gone. Even though I was so young, I was aware of the tension and stress in the air. By the time I was five, I remember thinking, This is gonna be a tough life. As a child, my heart reached out for my mother and even for my absent father, but instinctively I knew they were just wounded children themselves and I was on my own.
My parents met in Long Beach in the late 1960s while sleeping in the living room of a mutual friend named Billie, a prostitute and drug dealer who, my mother said, had a beautiful heart. When they met, my mother had just left her first husband, whom shed married in Tijuana at age sixteen, and my father had just gotten out of prison after serving a year for check forgery. They were young, homeless, and completely down on their luck. Neither had family and both were looking for someone or someplace to call home.
Within days, theyd fallen head over heels in love. Desperate to bury their pasts, they took off in an old Cadillac to start a new life together. Like so many of their generation, they were also searching for meaning and simply wanted to be happy and free. My father had a longing to study meditation and Eastern philosophy, and their road trip was meant to be a great spiritual adventure.
But their Cadillac broke down in Reno and, on an impulse, they decided to get married there. My father was a dark-skinned African American, and my mother is of European ancestry. Interracial couples were very controversial in the late sixties and they had a hard time finding a minister who would even talk to them, let alone marry them. Finally, they were married in a tiny Nevada chapel, and from that day on they were subjected to hatred and racism almost every single day of their relationship.
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