| Letters from the Sangha |
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Letters from Eli and Gangaji's Students
   Beloved... Your report lifted my heart. Your writing was so strong it lifted off the page and suffused my heart with joy. It was as if you were sitting right next to me and I could feel your energy throughout my being. A true transmission. I’ve had numerous challenges the last 4 years with this past year being the toughest. It’s as if I’ve been circling the drain, around and around going nowhere. Somehow, reading your report, I fell in and am still falling. I think that drain is called Surrender. I love you always and bless the many healing souls who have eased your way. You are my way and my light. I know that by not letting myself down I will keep faith with the gifts you’ve made available. Sometimes I struggle, but for that period of time it’s just what is. Inevitably the darkness lifts and the whole world sparkles. Each moment is precious and more so with your dear life in this world. Beloved Eli... I've been wanting to write for weeks since your last letter went out. But today seemed especially auspicious. Forty years since Dr. King was murdered...40 years since Robert Kennedy got up on a flatbed and spoke from his heart to the crowd assembled, just a few weeks before he himself was gunned down. I wept when a videotape played Dr. King saying, "I've been to the mountain top. I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you...." I've watched the video clip from "Facing Everything" many times. You sound so familiar. You and Gangaji laughing together, sitting side by side. I deeply recognize you both, beyond facial recognition. It's the family of Man. My family. All of our family seems so familiar, the recognition is primal. You have blazed a trail for us to the promised land and we are already here, together. There is no way I can ever express in words how much I love you, how I adore you, how often I laugh because of you, how much I think of you and pray for you. In the almost 3 years that my health has been a constant reminder of impermanence, how life as we think we know it can change in the flutter of an eyelash, I have become a better person. Even these last few months, I see myself surrendering so many of those "little" things that used to clutter my mind. If I have to make a choice, I make it. Doubt has taken a back seat. After you get through with "not this, not that"the remainder is love, peace, relaxation. I still have many moments of contraction, but the instant I allow awareness, everything falls away. You and Gangaji came into my life through pure grace. I certainly didn't behave like I deserved such a gift. I went to your new web site today. The best part was reading the letters from others whose love and gratitude is also boundless. Their names weren't signed, but I knew them and their words as my own self. In deepest love and gratitude and prayers for your complete healing here on Earth. ________________________________________ Beloved Eli, So when someone asked me about my experience of being with you last week, and her query to me of ‘why don’t we allow love in all the way?’ this was my response: I have found for me that I did not let love in all the way because I was not deserving of love if I did not do anything to earn it. This physical pain came along and in it’s perfection does not allow me to do much of anything for anybody. The pain has been something that I can either fight with and suffer or forgive it and welcome it as is, as part of this body; at least for now. I went to see Eli with nothing to give and I was received with the most unconditional love and compassion. He held my hand and I had nothing to give back except my love for him! I could finally fully receive love for I now feel OK just as I am. I have forgiven my entire existence and embraced my own humanity, all of it from the beginning to the present and all that came before. I am open to receive because of this forgiveness. To put it another way, I am no longer a victim of my body, of my life and it’s circumstances as they appear. Nothing is a problem when the victim mentality does not exist. So it follows that there is no problem with letting love in all the way. And it is much easier now to give love back since there is so much coming in from all corners it is impossible to hoard :) ________________________________________ Dear Eli, Dear Gangaji, I just read the letters and reports of the last “Update on Eli” once again. It touches me so deeply to see the photos of you and Gangaji. It touches me so much to read the love-letters, it is such an amazing support. What was it, that made me look at your photos again and again? Now I know. One photo of you Eli, the last but one, suddenly held my attention and didn’t let me move away. I fell into your eyes and started crying, crying and laughing and laughing and crying in the glance of your eyes. This look is pure and deepest Joy!!! I see you laying there, so open, so totally naked, totally defenseless, totally exposed, totally fearless. This is what pure vulnerability, pure surrender looks like?!!! Your glance is telling me that this is being human and this is God’s Love light at the same time. Unspeakable is this joy in the midst of pain! Before this happened, I had read the letter with the prayer and I asked myself: “What does the pain and power of women have to do with Eli, here on this page, now? Being in your eyes an answer appeared. Your glance, your being, begins to heal something in me. My pain, my disappointment, my frustration, the power, the violence, the fear, everything that “men have done and still do to me.” Strange, up to this moment I was not even really aware of these feelings. And yes, this is what I have done and what I do to men! Suddenly I realized that I was looking at an open man, I have never seen an open man before, Eli! It is as if you surrender for the sake of all men, for the sake of all women, for the sake of forgiveness. Are you the essence of men, do all men look like this in the depth of their soul” Like a dry river thanks the rain, I thank you for the compassion which arises in me now! Thank YOU endlessly, that you have shown this to me, that I am able to see this now!!! With grateful love ________________________________________ Dear Eli, I just have seen your pictures at your website. No words. I am really touched. When I see this pureness in your eyes, every fight which I had with you, seems so small and illusionary. What is left, is the truth. The truth, who are You and who I am. How are you right now? Is there any way to support you? I feel the wish to meet you directly and see into your eyes. Only, if this is your wish too and if it is appropriate for you. I feel very connected. ________________________________________ Dearest One, We keep up with notices of the fierce play in the life of Eli. Though in form we are at the periphery of what is happening, in truth it is all one great spin of love.If you or Gangaji need these hands, we will come. Your neighbors... ________________________________________ I want to send and add my love to the numberless messages of love to you. Although I never had the pleasure of doing a retreat with you, I did see you at one of Gangaji's retreats at Lake George. While there, you came walking up the road, I was a distance from which I could not make out your face but even at such a distance I felt such a jolt of loving energy that I thought you might have been a family member or someone dear to me. It turned out to be so . As you got closer , I recognized you from pictures I had seen of you, and saw on your face a smile that welcomed me completely and I experienced a freedom to love everyONE....being all the same ONE.. Indescribable really and soooo beautiful...such a present you gave me and you don't even know me. I thank you from the eternal depths of my heart for the gift YOU ARE to this One and, I believe, to this planet. I pray that your journey here on earth turns out to be a long one, resting in the embrace of infinite love. I pray that your body and mind may be spared and blessed with joyful recovery. ________________________________________ Dear Eli, You are present with me and I feel your radiance. May all things work together with the best outcome for your physical body. You have made such a LOVE impression on me - I share YOU with everyone I meet. You have shown me how Great Love stands untouched by any perception of humanness - it just keeps radiating, infinitely sourced forever! Thank you for the precious gift of sangha that has gathered around the Light you bring - I am deeply enjoying this refuge. These true friendships have become life-long allies for Truth. Thank you for a way to be with clients that surpasses any training I have found elsewhere. Thank you for taking the complexity out of healing and replacing it with laughter. Thank you for countless satsangs which go on resonating in me. Thank your for the first 3-year group where you jump-started me into Freedom. Thank you for the depth of your Love NOW which is making every moment in the seeming past and future I ever spent with you resonate more Still and Alive. Thank you for your Life. All is clear - you have done your job with me and I now celebrate with you. I am eternally grateful and I love you more than I can say. With you always ________________________________________ Dear Beloved Eli, I could see that in the past weeks I have been avoiding the pain at your becoming ill. I was angry here or neutral rather than truly touched. The letter led me to the hidden pain. The pain from so many lives, so much suffering in the world. So many lies. To see that I am connected to all of that, it is always me. That is what I didn't want to accept. I felt this pain many times in the past and didn't want to carry it. So I became hard. I was young and didn't know how to deal with it. That was also the time that I wished for a teacher as a teenager. Now, it has changed. I can carry it. There is compassion and it falls into love. It is as if I feel more of myself and can express it. I accept myself more and so I am able to accept others more. It is most difficult with the people I am closest to. That also means that I let go of things in order to truly participate in the moment. Being myself- even when I am wild or angry or loving or whatever. There is more and more acceptance of what is. I feel like all the 'spiritual highlights' are gone (ecstacy, visions etc.). Simply life. It is as if God has nurtured us like a child on the breast , a rather spoiled childhood, and then puberty with its ups and downs. In the end to realise that it is not all about being spoiled. Seeing dark sides makes life completer. What also is present in the letter you sent me. All the many sides of you and Gangaji that we have experienced. What I feel toward you both is untouched by those things. That surprises me the most. There is an everdeepening love. Through you my life becomes satsang. Bahkti yoga or karma yoga or the others take on meaning and are liveable. Thankful, ever thankful to have met you. I see now that I met you both before we met in the body, in other people, in small gestures, experiences from the past that return to me and remind me of you. Then my heart breaks more and more, so that I think I can't take it anymore (at least that is what my brain tells me). I experience thought that a bridge is building between the heart and the brain and love is the bridge. This way all the dark canyons can be bridged. ________________________________________ Prayer dedicated to Beloved Eli For Gangaji and Eli with all my love God, give me the strength to tell the truth about what is not resolved in myself, in us women, so that men can be relieved from the weight of our punishment and our withdrawal. Give me the clarity, to see how I, as woman misuse myself in love affairs, where I take the power to live love and afterward deny that, in believing I am victim of men and that I was misused by them. God break my heart open, so that I can feel for myself and all women on earth, this hurt without blaming internally and externally, so that this fresh truth of no victim, no perpetrator can come forward - for all of us, women and men. Give me the compassion to bare all this hurt with my eyes open, so that I don't lose myself in this ocean of hurt but stay conscious. God let myself see, how I and other women are using ourselves in staying in our suffering and victimism to blame men for their behaviour. Let me see clearly, how we prefer holding resentment in our hearts however true our story is, rather than to show our hurt to men staying with an open heart without blaming - and trusting the deep knowledge of a life experience, that openness brings me always home, to the light and beauty of my being – of who I am. Divine Mother, embrace me and all women who want that, in a never-ending embrace, so that I am allowed to rest in the full moon for as long as I need it, so that my tears can wash away what I don't need anymore and then set myself free, so that I can stand up, and walk to the mystery, where my feet and beauty are carrying me now, aware of my Self. Dear God, thank you for leading me to my teachers, who are a couple, a spiritual couple in a daily life. God, let me be close to my teachers, so that I can hear myself say to them: "Here I am, beloved teachers of mine, here I am, surrendered and empty, I am so grateful. Miraculously I am allowed to meet you, in the unpersonal and in the personal. You let myself come so close, so close to you personally, you share everything with me, both of you, everything, your truth, your love, your fixation, your hurt, your community, your betrayal, your marriage, your lies, your silence, your illness, your consciousness, your death, your home, your teacher, everything. How do I deserve that? How?” There is so much love, Gangaji, so much silence, Eli, everything is held, there is space for everything and I can become conscious of all that, through you, through grace....what a mystery that you share with me, you are giving me your live and death. Thank you forever and beyond. I am humbled and free forever, I recognise myself in you both - as one - and I am aware of myself as two, which is one. Does that make any sense? It doesn't matter. I am allowed to say a Koan, even if nobody ever would understand it. Thank you God for listening to me so deeply, my words came out of me so easily. Thank you God for giving me the space to speak to my teachers so directly, so personally, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you God for giving to me this prayer. May all beings be in peace. Amen ________________________________________ I think a year ago I dreamed with you and we were at satsang you were saying Goodbye and you said to me:” I see you everywhere.” But now I can say: Likewise. Eli I see you in every eyes I meet. Reflection of myself. I light two candles every day: one for the ones who need healing and one for the healers. I am sending you through these candles and through the sitting in silence my great wish for your well-being. I am sending you some great ancient famous Hungarian healing power… I love you and looking forward to meeting you in Ashland maybe. May there be love and peace among all beings of the Universe. All love ________________________________________ Dearest Eli, It is good to see the love in your face. It is the same love and quiet-force I met in you, when you were teaching in retreats. This love I can and do share. And its hard to see the suffering of your physical battle as well, which you have to do alone, with just support from the sideline. Thank you for sharing your unwanted journey. I myself have met a lot of tests these last 2 month's. I really thank you again for the road you and Gangaji invited me in. To be able to stop thoughts, to welcome every doubt and sadness and find the peace and freedom in every moment. Not that I always can. O no, I found out that its an never ending attention I have to give. To be alert and find out if its my heart or my mind, that leads the dance. The most difficult thing for me (being a man of contemplation but also action when problems occurs): is the choice between on one hand 'the wisdom, so that I know when to hold on', and on the other hand 'the love to let go the people (read Angela) who I loved and love'. Your 'wait and see', helps me in these days to accept this moment. |