On Loving the Death of My Wife (Sent to eList Dec. 21)

This was sent to my elist on Dec. 21, but I got busy and forgot to post it here. Been offline for a week while moving to my Caribbean lair…If you are not on my newsletter list, you can subscribe in top left corner of this page…:) I welcome further discussion and comments on the topics raised within.
michael

Inside Chi Flows Naturally:

A Winter Solstice bedtime read. Snuggle up under the covers.with your laptop……..

1. To read about the history and energetics of Winter Solstice, and how to construct your own Winter Solstice ceremony to plant the seed of what you want to birth in the coming year, you can read it on the Healing Tao USA Forum: http://forum.healingdao.com/practice/message/17568/

2. Master Si, Master Yu, Master Li, and Master Lai were all talking together.

“Who can regard non-action (wu-wei) as his head, life as his back, and death as his rump? Who can regard death and life, existence and annihilation, as a single body? I will be his friend.”
The four men looked at each other and smiled. There was no obstruction in their heart-minds and so they became friends. – Ch. 6 Chuang-Tzu translation: Louis Komjathy

3. For quick reference to the index for Joyce Gayheart’s Memorial page. http://www.HealingTaoUSA.com/JoyceGayheart

I recommend you first read the long essay below. It has links within it that relate to different parts of Joyce’s site.

Contents:
» Taoist Shijie – Liberation from the Corpse. Joyce photos
» Am I a Nut? or Surfing a Future Wave?
» Alchemical Marriage: Mind-Body Mating vs. Soul Love
» Stay Heart-Centered – Or Else!
» When Pain Becomes Conscious
» The Return of Horus as Hawk?
» Using Movement to Heal Deep Traumas
» Dark Goddess and Conscious Conception
» Return to Source: Way of the Inner Smile
» Support Your Spiritual Values, or Ever Bigger Government?

Taoist Shijie – Liberation from the Corpse. Joyce photos

Dear Travellers of the Way Beyond Life and Death,

Nine months ago, Joyce Gayheart – my partner of 25 years – left her form body. We met at a Healing Tao retreat in 1983. I went to the retreat hoping to end several years of celibacy with a spiritual marriage. Wow, did I get my wish – thank you, Tao!

At the retreat I was initially attracted to Joyce’s ethereal, almost alien quality. I thought of her as a blonde sky-goddess. It was confusing, because she wasn’t my preferred dark haired earth-goddess type. The first time I touched her spine I heard the Music of the Spheres. I later discovered she’d had E.T. contact three times, leading me to suspect she was half star-being. She had a physical mark over her third eye where extra-terrestrial “doctors” had come floating in to drill on her forehead at night, at the same time local papers were filled with UFO sightings. Small wonder we had such cosmic love-making experiences….cellular memories of her star system? “My trophy wife from Andromeda”, I’d tease her.

I think it was part of Joyce’s humor to wait until leap year’s day – Feb. 29, 2008 – to leap to the mysterious Other Side. She found a crack in the facade of calendar time and slipped into it. Then, amazingly, after her soul floated around her still body for three days, she found a way to slip back into life. She – her soul essence – leapt into another body on March 3, at 3:03 am. A trinity of 3’s.

Taoists call this “shijie”, or achieving liberation from the corpse. The body has died, but the soul uses its will to instantly re-new itself in a way that isn’t possible until resistance from the body is gone. It’s a way to cheat death, or at least speed past the re-incarnation process, which would have seemed too slow for Joyce during these fast-changing times. Joyce did not want to miss the exciting dimensional shifts happening on Earth in the next few years. Her mind was not happy about leaving. But it seems her soul opted for a different journey. It checked out of her body and merged into someone else’s.

I shared Joyce’s death & rebirth drama with family and friends in three letters., sent nine months ago. Those letters are posted on her new web pages. I am deeply grateful to all who supported me through those changes. Thank you, thank you, thank you. A brief photo essay on Joyce’s life and her passing is at http://www.healingdao.com/JoyceGayheart/Passing.html

I chose not to immediately make her “death-defying leap” public in this newsletter, where I normally share my life as my way to explore cultivation of The Way. I needed time to digest the amazing event and the transformations it wreaked upon my own psyche. I want to crack open the shell of fear surrounding death, but from a deeper knowing. So I’ve waited until after the shock has passed to make this re-assessment. Nine months seems an appropriate period of gestation.

It wasn’t that I doubted the reality of “shijie”, of the possibility of soul transfer. I believe in the future that soul transfer will be commonplace, just as telepathy will eventually make the transitional technology of cell phones into museum antiques. Soul “walk-ins” are a popular quasi-esoteric notion in the West that reverse mirrors the Taoist idea of shijie. Taoist shijie is only vaguely defined, like most things surrounding death. It implies consciously walking into to another physical body or shifting into a Light Body immediately after death.

The Western notion of soul walk-in is when some entity walks into you from points unknown, displacing and/or appropriating the body and aspects of the personality for its own mission. A famous case of that might be Byron Katie, who went from clinical severe depression to enlightenment in 60 seconds. The new Byron didn’t know the names of her kids. Her new persona was quite foreign to her husband.

I met Byron through my sister Robin, who used to be her main organizer. When I scanned Byron, I was amazed to discover there was no individual soul frequency coming from her heart center – it was totally empty. A unique heart frequency or soul-signature would have belonged to the “old” depressed Byron, and it normally has lots of detectable ancestral bloodline “stuff” that define us as human. Instead, there was only a very high and beautiful stellar frequency circling around the crown of the new Byron Katie’s head – what I believe was the soul’s replacement “team”.

Eckhardt Tolle has a similar sudden awakening story – from suicidal on a park bench to instant new age master. Given how disembodied he sometimes acts, he may also a good candidate to be a soul walk-in with a specific spiritual mission. I’m not saying they are less than human, or robotic zombies – just different than most souls that come into through a womb and mature slowly.

These are speculations about the likely nature of their sudden shift in consciousness that are not verifiable. I haven’t heard of any of their followers able to replicate their feat. The moral here is simple: Soul life, like biological life, is amazingly diverse.
Am I a Nut? or Surfing a Future Wave?

Joyce’s soul transfer was totally different. My body was the vessel for this experiment, so I am the direct witness. Joyce’s Higher Self implanted a drop of her soul’s heart-essence into ME. But it was a mutually and consciously agreed upon – call it negotiated – merging of two soul forces. It was not a walk-in situation.

Undergoing the sudden and deep identity change I went through does test one’s sanity. Undoubtedly some will dismiss it as mere death fantasy. I met a friend recently who said: “Oh, I thought that was just something that you felt back then, nothing permanent”.

No, this was definitely as permanent as any physical heart transplant – I don’t look any different on the outside, but the insides are permanently changed. I’m fine with you fondly regarding me as your favorite nut case. But if your mind is open to it, read the letter I wrote immediately afterward, with a full and fresh account of our 3-hour “heart implant” operation. The shijie details are at: http://www.healingdao.com/JoyceGayheart/Shijie.html

One reason I know it was not a temporary death-stimulated fantasy is because I am still experiencing the effects of it, nine months later. The ongoing nature of my experience is why I am even bothering to write this letter. My personal view is that while my experience is somewhat unusual for this time period, I suspect that it will become commonplace within a decade as the planet shifts and consciousness becomes more “fluid”, with a softer boundary between life and death and between different souls.

The unspoken question here: who is creating all these soul patterns, and why? The answer will depend on what cosmology you accept.

In retrospect, I enjoyed Joyce’s dying as much as I enjoyed her living loveliness. At first it was difficult to witness her physical pain, spread out over the last two years. We diagnosed her cancer as starting 14 years earlier, triggered by heavy doses of x-ray radiation following a car accident and two surgeries. It snuck in as a soft breast cyst, fooling numerous MD’s, medical intuitives, and arrays of diagnostic tests, which all declared her cancer-free. Her acupuncturist, with decades of experience, confirmed she did NOT have the pulses of a cancer patient.

Yet this “anomalous cyst” grew into a painful breast tumor, finally confirmed by biopsy. She dissolved it after a year, and thought she was cured. We bought tickets to the Caribbean to celebrate. Then a sudden explosion of multiple brain and liver tumors. We spent the next month visiting a different island, one filled with Ray Guns pointing at the tumors in her head. It bought her a few months of clarity. Then I think she decided they were going to win eventually, and she surrendered.

Her pain and dying process opened up many wonderful intimate and tender new spaces, that we quickly filled with love. The most difficult part for me was her refusal to accept my considerable qigong and shengong healing skills. A stubborn Scots-Irish, she insisted mostly on healing herself. It was a self-empowerment issue. It was HER ancestral disease pattern; her mother had suffered the same breast cancer and died of an anger-fed liver tumor. It was an ancient wound in the female side of her lineage, and she felt no man could heal it. She wanted only female healers to work on her.

Frustrated, I asked the I Ching for guidance. It gave me exactly the same advice as I got from Joyce: do nothing, its her process. So I just held a neutral space in which her process could unfold. I was guided to continuously practice Heaven & Earth Alchemy, One Cloud’s 6th Formula for Immortality. That practice includes calling in the Three Pure Ones, allowing them to hold within me the totality of space and radiate a love for the infinite possibility for Humanity in all dimensions.

Joyce’s dying process became my deepest meditation, an opportunity to make even closer friends with Death. I opened wider the Mysterious Portal of the Dark Female (xuan guan). It is the opening to the realm of formless forms hidden inside each of us. This is the portal both Joyce and I had cultivated with inner alchemy. She was, or so I thought, now entering it fully upon her death.

But apparently the portal is a revolving door for souls, as it proved for Joyce. During this period I had major breakthroughs in grasping the relationship between the primordial chi field, the birth of the impulse to love, and humans. The short summary of it: it is Humanity’s destiny to teach our parents, Heaven and Earth, new lessons about the possibilities of embodied love.
Alchemical Marriage: Mind-Body Mating vs. Soul Love
Joyce and I treated our married life together as an alchemical adventure. It began more as a spiritual attraction than a need for sexual mating. Her final gift to me was an alchemical drop of her super-potentiated heart-essence, the crystallized wisdom of her lifetime. I’ve become the guinea pig in the next phase of an experimental, multi-dimensional marriage. The effect of her gift was to make my own soul androgynous, i.e. more female-male balanced.

It feels great – I now have TWO streams of higher Self-consciousness that are merging in each moment. That means I can more powerfully alchemically triangulate with the Life Force – the two streams plus whatever else I focus on. How has that changed me?

Physically, I feel like my body is growing younger. I suspect the male-female split at the soul level produces in humans a subtle tension of disharmony that accelerates aging. So I feel this male-female soul merger supported the commitment I had made on my 50th birthday to live and serve another 100 years. Part of my Taoist mission is to smash limiting cultural thought forms such as “I’m 80, guess it’s time to die”. That would qualify amongst Taoists as physical immortality; they don’t really want to stay in limited physical form forever. Just long enough to accomplish some deep spiritual work in this normally unconscious physical plane.

Energetically, the single biggest change has been a ten-fold increase in my heart’s ability to feel more deeply inside myself and others. The feelings are not the volatile outer emotions arising in my personality; that has become even more calm. It’s more akin to feeling a deep river of soul knowing, that as it flows, constantly shifts my human identity.

I see emotions as being like surface waves on the ocean. Soul feelings are the currents circulating between the surface and the still depths of the ocean. The soul is what flows along the macro-cosmic orbit that communicates between our inner life and the outer environment. The “oversoul”, “the faces of God” or (great spirit, “da shen” to the Taoists) in this metaphor would be the 12 tectonic plates, the vessel holding the ocean.

Even the smallest shifts in these plates send powerful new soul wave currents flowing up to the surface of Earth. If you stay fluid, it’s comes out as a new wave pattern dancing on the surface of the ocean. If you are rigid earth, it behaves like an earthquake. I’m still grappling with this new 10x feeling potential, gradually allowing it into the flow of my heart-mind (personality).

All these changes have turned my path into a razor’s edge. I quickly found out the new and powerful soul forces flowing through my heart were not under fully under the control of my everyday heart-mind. Some times the river of feeling will surge and overflow the banks of my body-mind. And I’ve found myself more frequently in soul communication with people whose everyday minds are not aware of the soul-plane conversation I’m having with them.

Let’s be clear: these soul feelings can get very intense, uncomfortably so. It’s a kind of inter-active, whole body “kundalini-on-demand”. The heart is the sexual organ of the soul. There is a strong sexual feeling to these interactions when the soul gets to embody more deeply, but it’s”heart-sex”. The only way I can describe it is to suggest that most people, once or twice in a lifetime, have the experience of deeply “falling in love”.

These are probably moments when soul communication with the loved one overwhelms ordinary mind and senses. Falling in love can be viewed a kind of obsession or divine love-sickness in which you lose your ordinary self. It’s a feeling of transcendence or enlightenment. Then you marry and realize that grounding and integrating that Love Enlightenment isn’t easy or as simple as “falling” in love promised it to be.

I’m having that level of intensity, but often without any sensory or romantic/sexual stimulation. The person is physical, but I’m often not in their presence, and may barely know them. It’s a little different than romantic love, where you typically “fall” into the other person’s center of gravity. In my case, their soul comes into me and I am caused to “fall” into a deeper center of gravity within myself, or perhaps that is mid-way between us. Call it an inter-subjective center of gravity.

I was having these kinds of experience before merging Joyce’s heart into my own. The mind cannot choose this; it spontaneously happened to me once every five years. Now its happening every few months. For my previous writing on this topic, visit the “Tao Newsletter archive” accessed from HealingTaoUSA.com homepage.

This article is titled “Soul Sex: the Hidden Driver Behind Romantic Love”. Note: you cannot open the archive files without a cookie on your computer, which you get when you sign up for the free Inner Smile ebook. People change their settings. So you may need to re-register at the top of the Articles page: http://www.healingdao.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode2&articleid=75

Stay Heart-Centered – Or Else!
It’s a complex and tricky dynamic. How do you decide which level of reality to live and play in? It scares some people to hear that their ordinary mind does not fully control the boundaries or activities of their soul. My view is that the ordinary body-mind (our sensations, thoughts and emotions) express the soul, often imperfectly, but do not control the soul. When mind and soul merge, then they behave as one – but that may be rare.

Then you graduate into the soul-oversoul dialectic, which is one I’m dealing with currently. I think our whole planet is slowly entering into a challenge similar to mine, as the physical Earth God/dess gradually expands into a more subtle dimension of it-Self. We are all shifting into a world where energetic boundaries are much softer.

As long as I stay heart-centered, I feel no grief or separation from Joyce. It’s been 9 months since her passing; the shijie experience seemed to have erased my past emotions, and erased the grief I was feeling intensely at the time of her death. So to answer the question most frequently asked: no, I don’t miss her. My old mind and its emotions died. I have her essence in my heart, closer now to me than when she was physical. Only when I shifted into memory of my “old” head did I even think about Joyce’s physical absence. It is instant feedback. Head = dark clouds of the past. Heart = sunshine of the present moment.

If I don’t stay fully heart-present the consequences can be dire. Two months after the heart implant, I was working at my computer at 4 am, getting tired. I idly clicked on a spam email with an amusingly idiotic title, and found myself on a porn site. It was like TV, which I never watch. When I do see it, it seems fascinating for a few minutes until the deathly boring nature of its programming resurfaces. I let my curiosity explore the nether world of porn for a bit, wondering aloud to myself – what was really behind its power to allegedly consume half of the internet’s usage?

But the Sex Beast driving the internet apparently had a much deeper shadow than I knew, or perhaps my new heart was still too delicate to absorb the dark soul forces trapped in humanity’s sexual identity crisis. The next day I got severe “energy sickness” in my heart. I hadn’t ever felt this terrible. It lasted for weeks. I wanted to die; it’s incredibly difficult to heal a soul-level heart attack. This would never have happened to my “old self” with its well-crafted defenses.

I got the clear message: this is not the same life. I must treat my new male-female hybrid soul like a delicate newborn.
When Pain Becomes Conscious
When you are a conscious individual like Joyce, death itself is relatively easy. Death is liberation. Dying is the hard part. The shadow side of you holding the pain becomes acutely conscious – it’s what makes you feel alive. Pain killers only dull the sharp edge of the pain. Joyce often found the bardo-like, semi-conscious grogginess of opiates to be spiritually more painful than the raw physical pain.

The soul wants to feel the aliveness of the body’s pain as proof of its existence. It is the mind that fears pain and struggles to suppress it. Drugs are a kind of half-way death. So Joyce would periodically go cold turkey and purge all painkillers. Only then did she allow me to use qigong healing transmission, which quickly helped build up enough neutral chi to give her a window of peace after weeks of sleepless agony. Sometimes she would find the neutral spot on her own, but it was difficult to stay there during such aggressive changes in pain level.

Joyce was a powerful healer. Like my friend Ron Diana who passed two years earlier, she was a wounded healer. I believe Joyce could have healed herself completely were it not for an old, incurable self-anger at not having children. Why incurable? According to a spirit guide, it was an unusual case of her soul (ling) being so ambitious that it overflowed as pressure onto her everyday heart-mind (xin, in Taoist terms, the ordinary mind that operates via the senses). She felt perpetually judged by her own soul for her going against her own desire and not having children. This is where “eating right, meditating and living right” as her preventative for cancer met its limits.

Joyce felt emotionally pinned to the empty-womb issue like a captured butterfly; no matter how vigorously she flapped the wings of her mind, there was no escaping the soul pressure. She released the anger a thousand different ways in her mind, as she was brilliantly skilled in dozens of healing modalities. But her mind was unable to release her soul from its ambition.

This speaks to the limits of our relationship; we agreed not to have children before we married, at my insistence. She was ten years older than me, and time ran out before I saw my error. Offers to adopt or use surrogates were rejected. Taoist dual cultivation and alchemy practice was our alternative solution; we merged our energy bodies deeply, and worked on birthing the immortal inner child. Our inner alchemy love meditations became a refuge of peace and bliss.

But her mind vs. soul conflict over children simply could not be resolved this lifetime. It periodically erupted as a volcanic feeling of failure, despite her numerous other successes. It blocked her from going to the next level of mastering her destiny with the alchemical process. I would meditatively shift into the planetary sphere. There I would rummage about in humanity’s warehouse of soul archetypes, hoping to find a replacement soul pattern for her.

But at the soul level it’s not quite as simple, not like changing the emotional or thinking clothing of one’s daily mind. Our soul’s suit of inner clothing is tailored for a whole life. I couldn’t change out the soul pattern for Joyce; she had to do it. I do know that it is possible, with the right spiritual skill, and if she had been willing to choose it. But that’s all past; she has now thrown the dice of shijie, and gambled with me, on some new and unknown outcome in our new androgynous soul pattern.

Welcome to the Wheel of Life – another name for Destiny’s high-stakes casino.
The Return of Horus as Hawk?
More shamanic confirmations of the power of Joyce’s spirit essence began to happen. First, a giant white albino squirrel appears, so big I thought it was a small white dog jumping around near my stone circle. Then a week later, while cleaning the house, I found a poem written by my sister Robin for Joyce’s Life Celebration service. You can read the poem here, and a moving song by Barry Spendlove, and other lovely stories at: http://www.healingdao.com/JoyceGayheart/Joyce_Ceremony.html.

I was moved by the lovely poem, and felt called to step out onto my deck, and look out over the terraced gardens below that Joyce had infused with so much love.

Immediately my attention was drawn to a speck high in the sky. I stood transfixed as it dove straight at me, until I could see it was a giant hawk. I went into shock as it swooped immediately in front of me, did three dare-devil spiraling loops, then gracefully landed ten feet away on a tree branch overhanging my deck. It sat there, its hawk-eyes burning into my mine.

No hawk had ever dared to dive this close to the house, much less performed pyrotechnics for my benefit. I realized this was a “spirit-bird”, a messenger from my new greater Self. It was letting me know that my heart-feelings had the power to immediately crystallize omens and natural forms from the chi field of Nature.

The hawk and I looked at each other for ten minutes. I have always known that part of my spiritual lineage comes from an ancient bird tribe that thrived in China tens of thousands of years ago. Joyce regressed me once, and the only “past” or parallel life that came up was me as giant bird in ancient China that had been blinded. It had to perform some service for a young woman to heal its karma, and then was able to fly beyond the earth’s atmosphere out into the stars.

Staring at the hawk jiggled my memory of this past life recall, and also reminded me of my nine trips to Egypt. I wondered if this hawk was some form of Horus-falcon, in Egypt the sacred child of Osiris and his sister-wife Isis. The incestuous relationship of the creator gods Osiris-Isis is similar to Chinese myths of a divine brother-sister, whose sexual coupling starts the yin-yang cycle. It’s really a cosmology, about our original human nature being androgynous, half-male half-female. The two halves of the single being copulate to begin creation.

When Joyce and I were remarried in 1992 in the King’s chamber of the Great Pyramid, the Atlantean guide performing the ceremony showed up (for those with the Eye to see) in the form of a human body with the head of Horus, the Falcon-Headed One.

Horus is said to have had sun-moon eyes, with his moon eye being blinded during a battle with his uncle Set, the Jackal-headed dark-side God of Chaos. Mythically, that’s why we still get a dark moon. The Eye of Horus myth was a little too close for comfort. I went physically half-blind after that pyramid initiation in 1992. I developed a rare eye disease…and was told I would definitely go 100% blind within two years. I cured my eyes by staring open-eyed at the outer sun every day, and cultivating my inner sun-heart with One Cloud’s 5th meditation formula, Planetary-Soul Alchemy.

Why was this hawk visiting me now? Was it an omen confirming my deep communion with Joyce’s oversoul?

The Great Pyramid initiation (preceding our re-marriage ceremony) was designed to download karma from future lives. Both Joyce and I believe that it also “caused” her car accident later in 1992, part of speeding up the clearing of her ancestral karma. The many doses of X-ray radiation she received, a form of fractured spiritual light, in turn triggered her cancer, which in turn led to her death and rebirth within me 16 years after the accident. Several other adepts died from cancer or heart attacks following that Pyramid initiation. I believe their bodies couldn’t handle the level of spiritual fire. It speeded them right off the planet.

My Bird Tribe karma has now come full circle. Is Horus-hawk now staring at me, to remind me that with my new heart implant I should expect a wild ride, and expect an even more rapid DOUBLE karmic download of my/Joyce’s future androgynous self?? Is that where human souls – and ultimately bodies – are evolving? I remembered a similar prediction in The Explorer Race by Robert Shapiro. There is a third, androgynous sex coming in, whose mission is to hold the neutral space to make it easier to resolve the male-female battle of the sexes.

The physical hawk suddenly spread it wings, and began hopping around, flying from tree to tree around my house, as if inspecting the gardens and grounds. It certainly wasn’t hunting; its huge wings would crash ludly against tree branches and scare off any wildlife. I got the strange feeling Hawk was checking up on me – to make sure I was keeping up Joyce’s gardens??!!!
Using Movement to Heal Deep Traumas
Joyce was a smiling Flower Goddess, master gardener, movement educator, author, and talented alchemist. She was one of my main teachers, and an inspiration to many. She loved Taoist inner alchemy meditation and qigong, although two car accidents made it difficult for her to stand and practice for long.

She thus relied more on lying-down super-learning Feldenkrais + qigong, a kind of Taoist yoga (tao-yin) type exercise she developed, to achieve a feeling of grace and lightness in her body. She lived in a fragile body that was hair-trigger sensitive; just being bumped could put her into pain for months. It was these “lying-down qigong” processes that allowed her to live for 16 productive years after the last debilitating car accident.

Joyce’s audio tapes integrating Feldenkrais and Primordial Qigong (but applicable to any tai chi form) are truly one of the most marvelous gifts she left behind. They are great for healing many body issues, but especially low back, spine and hip injury or other joint pain. Her first four audio CD’s are just now available on http://www.TaiChi-Enlightenment.com/#JGPF. You can get them separately or as a package (and save $20).

More will be coming later, along with CD audio from her Fusion/Emotional Alchemy workshop. You can also hear her on our Healing Love: Taoist Secrets of Sex workshops where 3 CDs are devoted to women’s sexual self-healing. She has the most sonorous, goddess voice I’ve ever heard. Just listening to her transports you to a place of healing. You can listen to a sample audio clip on her site.

She was always making alchemical flower essences to release emotional trauma. Her most popular was Divine Love Elixir, made from 72 flower essences, mostly from roses she grew and harvested at Solstice and Equinox. I have more mother stock, waiting to be bottled. Her gardens were planted in sacred geometric mandalas, into which she invited various devas to empower the flowers. Her Flower Essences were very effective in speeding the healing process for herself and many others. I often administer them in my meditation classes, and observe folks releasing much faster.

In her life Joyce wore a heavy cloak of enormous physical suffering. But she wore it with such grace, most people never suspected her level of suffering. From the outside it seemed to me as if her oceans of inner pain were lifted by angel wings. Much of the pain Joyce held was on behalf of ancestors and the human collective. It was her spiritual work; she was simply one of many unsung women with huge hearts, strong enough to hold the shadow for the rest of us.

She never lost her radiance, even when dying; the lightness of her being shines forth even in her final photos. Joyce’s full life autobiography, how she integrated her life of suffering with her deep spiritual impulse, is posted as well. A shorter version of her story was published in a fascinating book on astrology called Under One Sky by Rafael Nasser. 12 top astrologers from 12 different schools – some very famous names – blindly analyzed Joyce’s natal chart.

Under One Sky is the only book on astrology that allows you to compare the predictions to her actual life story. This unique book has become a classic, and is being used as textbook to teach astrology, but is very accessible to anyone. Each astrologer discusses their process and their ideas on fate and destiny. Several of Joyce’s friends read the book and their lives were totally changed by it. You can now order her book from http://www.healingdao.com/JoyceGayheart/Joyce_Book.html

If a link on her new site is not active, please call Jan in my office to order (888-999-0555) or email healingtaousa@bellsouth.net.

Dark Goddess and Conscious Conception

So where do I go now? I am being moved in some radical new directions, shocking even for me. For the moment, I just feel deep gratitude to Joyce, and for our continuing heart-essence life together. I now walk around our garden terraces, smiling to each flower and plant in a way I never did before, smiling to each one as if it was my dearest love child….

I’m enjoying the serenity of living alone in my cozy log home, fireplace crackling, cathedral ceilings. The land keeps me company: the elementals are awake and love to play, surrounded by 360 degree views of beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, N.C. But I know I will attract another woman soon, maybe one interested in exploring the novel possibilities of loving an androgynous being. She will likely share my mission to heal the collective wound caused when the original soul was torn into separate male and female bodies. She’s been showing up spontaneously in visions at the end of Kan & Li alchemy retreats.

It seems I am back to the dark-haired earth goddess I was attracted to before I married Joyce. It is a very deep archetype for me. This vision-woman has medium-length dark hair, I’m guessing in her mid-thirties, with a somewhat exotic face, some ethnic hint (Asian?) I cannot define. Dark hair “narrows” the field down to a few hundred million eligible women of that age on the planet. In the visions her face keeps changing slightly. Maybe my soul is just perusing a library of potential candidates. It is still a mystery to me how this soul selection process of partners takes place.

I’m not too concerned about finding her. I recently learned from an inner plane relationship how to amplify my magnetic/yin force. Maybe the lesson was part of a post-androgyne training I need to fully activate my stronger inner female.

The dark-colored hair of my vision-woman suggests that I’m now ready to complete something in my relationship to Inner Earth, True Darkness, the fertile earth-womb space of Pangu (Chinese name for Gaia). I’m left with a feeling the vision-woman is a wildly free spirit, torn between hunger for a child and a life of spiritual adventure. Her soul will find resolution in and be magnetized to OUR next mission – Conscious Conception. I will write about this soon.

Rather than hunting for a needle in a large haystack, I plan to use my new yin power to magnetically pull the needle out of the haystack of dark-haired goddesses. Maybe it’s someone reading this letter, or their friend. She will know, or at least have a strong feeling of curiosity. Send me an email – and a photo. 🙂
Return to Source: Way of the Inner Smile
Joyce’s death-rebirth has intensified my feeling of how infinitely kind the Tao is to share its immortal creativity with us mortal humans. We struggle to learn how to live in a tiny body, with an intense hunger to share our personal love and find freedom to express ourself. Our hunger is mirrored by an equally vast, impenetrable, cold and seemingly indifferent cosmos that we often fear as a punishment called Death.

Inner Smiling to a deeper level of self-acceptance is the only Way I’ve found to integrate these radical changes in my heart’s psychic infrastructure. It always comes back to the Way of the Inner Smile. Its the Way of self-acceptance, the Way of whole-heartedly embracing the flow of Life Force.

At this time of deep contemplation during the Winter Solstice, I feel myself pulled into the dark stillness within. I notice it feels more real, more substantial and vibrant. In that space I’m always smiling with Joyce, grateful for the opening of a new pathway, allowing our souls to embrace after death what we could not fully achieve during life. – the alchemical marriage of man and woman.

The only workable path I’ve found is to relax, surrender, and accept our power to play with the polar streams of the Life Force. Use all five limbs and senses to inhale and exhale life and death, mate female and male, embrace heaven and earth, and smile to the contradiction of personal and impersonal. These pulsating poles create one flowing process of Change that is its own absolute.

I am left with a challenge, which is also your challenge. Will we be able to dance upon the razor’s edge of Change in each moment? Will we be able to smilingly embrace even more deeply the male-female polar streams of our mortal being? I believe that is the path to becoming immortal. Immortals are the ones whose love for life is so deep, they are invited to continue dancing with the Life Force in the Multi-verse beyond the human cycle of life and death.

Love, chi, blessings,
Michael

“In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
-Thomas Merton (Trappist monk who popularized Chuang-tzu’s writings)

ps. I’m happy to receive your response after reading this story or to material on Joyce’s site. Just hit reply button. I may not have time to reply to all, but I will read it. Since I’m thinking of adding a section to Joyce’s site with responses, let me know if it’s OK to post what you send and if you want to be identified by name or initials or anonymous.

Again, for reference, Joyce’s webpage:

http://www.HealingTaoUSA.com/JoyceGayheart

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Healing Tao USA products and Healing Tao University summer retreats are part of Dao Alchemy Research Institute, Inc., a 501c3 IRS approved non-profit organization. We thank you for your interest and support.

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May abundant love, chi, and blessings flow to all,

Michael Winn,
President

Healing Tao USA
Dao Alchemy Research Institute, Inc.

Healing Tao USA • 4 Bostic Place • Asheville, NC 28803 • Tel. 888.999.0555

http://www.HealingTaoUSA.com/JoyceGayheart