..续本文上一页s all I had to do. It was a twenty day retreat and about two-thirds of the way through I was up to three hours, but nothing happened, of course. I was terribly disappointed. So I sat for four hours, five hours, and eventually I sat six hours without moving or opening my eyes. There was great pain of course, my whole body was on fire and it was like being in the hell-realms for an hour, then there would be an hour of bliss, then another hour of pain, of course, and I became completely absorbed in the body, it became this intense journey and the body became a vast universe. Somehow bells rang, people came and went, I just sat there, completely forgetting at one stage that there was even a world outside. And then in the evening a bell rang and I did open my eyes, and when I opened my eyes it was to my great body. "Oh, this is an interesting part of my body, it”s so green!" It took me some years to understand that experience. But that is the truth too. We do wake up to this great vast body.

　　A stone woman bears a child by night. Again, this is symbolic language. Stone woman also means barren woman, which is a metaphor for emptiness. Bears a child - everything is inconceivably empty yet it exists. Emptiness gives birth to form. The child here means the universe. This stone woman/barren woman bearing a child by night made me reflect too on the Christian image of the virgin birth and I suddenly realised that there were parallels there. The virgin woman is another image of emptiness and she gives birth to the child Jesus, to form.

　　We were having a women”s discussion recently during Easter and we decided to talk about how our Christian roots have conditioned our values and how we felt about that now. I was very involved in the Christian church when I was young, but one of the things that I had a problem with was the notion of original sin, that we were all so sinful in the eyes of God.

　　Later on, after leaving all of that, one of the things that attracted me about Buddhism was that we are all, at the essence, Buddha-nature. All beings by nature are Buddha. And I thought, "that feels better". But I heard recently of a German Christian philosopher who had explored the Latin roots of the word sin, and he said it meant separation, and then I understood - original sin is about the separation from totality, from God.

　　I”ve also been fascinated by this process of birth and death. I was a midwife for seven years, delivering babies in the bush and it was always a great privilege and honour to be invited to a birth. I had many wonderful experiences there. One thing I remember about these births is the energy and excitement, the focus and attention at the moment the baby comes out. At that moment, the baby is often blue and it does not breathe for that few moments. Everybody in the room solemnly looks at this tiny creature and waits for it to breathe and all the adults in the room are holding their breath. I would then say to everyone, "Breathe! How is this poor little creature going to learn how to breathe if we are all holding our breath

　　" That precious moment seems like an eternity, when we are waiting for the baby to breathe and we need to bring that same attention and precious quality right here to our own breathing to give birth to ourselves, to our own child by night.

　　Another thing I found about birthing which was quite addictive was this special quality of presence around birth, and usually when you really get into labour and are there for a while, all the things that don”t matter just fall away and it becomes a moment-to-moment experience. There”s a timeless quality about that energy. I went from delivering babies to spending time with people who are dying, and that same energy, that quality of presence is also true for people who are dyin…

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