Zooming Grace – with Videha

In a recent Diamond Sutra retreat with Videha, light-years of learning happened as I witnessed his extreme gentleness with people. I cried in joy and amazement when the master healer surrounded a suffering woman*) with purity and silence. He then told her she did not have to actually go through the huge pain she described but could go around it and just carry on, if the suffering was too much. There was a palpable sense of relief when he offered the surprise alternative to the typical “be strong, man-up, overcome it” advice of psychotherapy. Instead, we witnessed Videha engage with this woman as she is, a unique individual with unique interiors. His understanding, emotional intelligence, and in-the-moment compassion are rare, and the transformational moment of allowing this woman more space and more freedom lightened her load. This moment of grace allowed me to go deeper, much deeper in my own healing process.

When I was much younger, the future stretched before me like miles of beautiful, uncut cloth. What would I make of my time, my life? I couldn’t say, but I was naturally thrilled about every possibility. Positive high-energy was my mode. This peak lasted for years during which time I became identified with these positive powers as my own, when in fact the following years of failure showed me that success was merely on loan from the Divine.

I trekked through an impossible valley experience that seemed it would never end. Deeper in Osho meditation, I finally just surrendered all dreams, desires, and vision boards at his feet and looked for the gift in the valley. Through meditation I found that repressed fear, not love, was the high-octane fuel of my achieving.

High energy was just another form of aggression. And really, I was running extra hard to get away from my childhood shame and degradation, to escape and never return to my mother’s glacier of hate. I knew well that I could only have a solid place in the family politburo if I achieved something major and brought status to the whole tribe. This invisible burden deeply pressurized me. Moreover, the tribe was watching and keeping score.

The fear of being sacrificed weighed on me heavily. Succeed or else! The demand was non-verbal from birth: This family is in deep shit and you are our only hope. Siblings reflected to me from childhood that I was somehow BAD-BAD-BAD-BAD-BAD, a message fueled even more by my huge adult failures. Members of a power-based family were unconsciously parroting my disapproving mother’s silent command to dump the family’s disowned, primitive load on me. Ultimately, I had to leave the bio-family and claim the larger family of humanity as my own.

Fast forward to an incredible Diamond Sutra Retreat with Videha, via Zoom.

A truly unexpected healing came one morning after Videha offered a guided Guru Yoga session. When the meditation was over, I sat up, altogether new, different, free. Something was gone, my mother’s silent sick music, an anti-life dirge, a dark gravity. Deep in my psyche, her looping mantra that I was BAD-BAD-BAD-BAD-BAD just stopped. For the first time in my life I heard an unbothered soul silence as beautiful as a field of fresh snow. Her hidden voice had been the anti-life dirge I had fought against my entire adult life. It was hopeless. She pressurized me to succeed but fundamentally cast me as the family failure. Imagine growing up with a loud television roaring all day and all night – it was that horrific – I had gotten used to the noise of negativity, always there like wallpaper. Until this session, I didn’t even know her looping message of BAD-BAD-BAD-BAD-BAD was running until it arose in the foreground of my consciousness and I actually heard it. Then after decades, my mother’s continuous negative mantra simply ceased on my inner planes.

Through Osho’s grace and Videha’s healing gift, the negative mothernoise STOPPED and never came back. Unplugged. This complexity of total grace feels like a reward for meeting all the valley years with surrender. Disoriented for days without a negative guidance system, I could suddenly splash and play in a pure inner silence all my own.

Healing the impossible happens.

I am free. Ahhhhhhhh…

With deepest gratitude to Videha and team.

*) author has received explicit permission to mention this co-participant in her article

The host of this special event was Osho Atlanta Meetup, led by Anuradha and Paritosh – meetu.ps
Videha’s website: pilgrimsofemptiness.com

Article by Deva Dosa

Read all articles in this Series – Zooming Grace