My new book, a novel, “Leela’s Gift” has been released. In fact it can be viewed at http://lulu.com/spotlight/JLevine1. It will soon be (early August) available at amazon.com and many online venues where book are sold as well as in book stores (remember www.indiebound.org and independent book stores). “Leela’s Gift” is the story of a luminous inner spiritual  journey. It is set in New York and high in the Himalayas near Darjeeling in northern India. The novel uncovers archetypal and highly relevant spiritual teachings. East meet west in Leela. The book offers teachings on meditation and yoga,  practical paths to freedom from the often dispiriting and desperate quality of our contemporary lives. The novel intertwines Leela’s journey with modern philosophy  and primal wisdom and is infused with some of the inner teachings of Buddhism and the Enneagram. “Leela’s Gift” tells a story as old as the human heart.

Tags: ashram, Children, consciousness, creativity, cyberspace, Darjeeling, Desert Fathers, E-types, Enneagram, fiction, Leela's Gift, meditation, mind structure, Mind-training, Plato, rebirth, relationships, Sufi, teacher, Universal Forms, Vedic origins, www.janetlevine.com, yoga

Below you will find a photo of peonies that bloomed in my garden this morning. For some reason this is a once in three years occurrence so I greet each bloom with excitement. They are among the most beautiful peonies I have seen, and the scent is intoxicating. I have been a gardener for as long as I can remember. Growing up in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, I remember my mother at work with her roses, about 50 bushes of various varieties, secateurs in hand as she deadheaded, debudded (to leave only one rose on a stem) and carefully removed aphids and other undesirable pests. My grandfather who spent a third of every year with us always wore a fresh rosebud in the lapel of his suit jacket. When I was an adolescent I was given the rock garden as my provenance and loved to plan and plant and move rocks. My nemesis was the snails who shared my rock garden. Johannesburg, situated on a plateau at 6,00 feet, and with a temperate climate, dry heat and usually reliable summer rain, is an Eden for gardeners. There is one drawback, cyclical drought and with it watering restrictions, so every seven years gardeners watch their hard work, manicured lawns and the beauty they created wither and die. In the suburbs drilling for artesian water sources was a flourishing business.

As a young wife and mother I had first a pocket garden with an almost sub-tropical micro-climate due to a sunny vantage and thick white washed walls. Around giant strelitzes,  avocado and mulberry trees the carefullly designed borders flourished. Later I had almost an acre in which to garden and loved every inch of the rich loam in which whatever I planted grew with vigor and beauty.

When we moved to the Boston area many years ago I had to re-examine everything I had learned about gardening. Our first home was a three hundred year old carriage house set on an acre of land. We had hundred year old giant beeches on the property. The land itself had been neglected for years, but with care and attention a garden will emerge with alacrity from underneath the undergrowth and weeds. As I uncovered flower beds, dug and sowed, the garden returned to some of its previous glory. From spring to autumn we ate fresh produce from the rescued and resuscitated cold frame beds. I planted strawberries around the swimming pool, hosta in the shady areas and a riot of day lilies wherever I could. I learned to accept the cycle of the year, and reluctantly return my gardening tools to their permanent place in the garage each November. Come February the catalogs arrived and soon I would have spindly seedlings growing under lights.

I planted myself in American soil in bringing that garden back to life.

Now I have a much smaller garden again. It is all I want to manage. For me little else in life compares to the satisfaction of caring for a flower bed of rich dark soil where every plunge of the weeding fork or hand spade reveals not only the roots of the weed but wriggling earth worms too. Then you know you have an arable patch and the result is glorious peonies like these.

Tags: Children, consciousness, creativity, cyberspace, Desert Fathers, E-model, fiction, gardening, Janet Levine, janetlevine.com, Kabbalah, Leela's Gift, mediation, meditation, mind structure, Mind-training, peonies, Plato, reconciliation, relationships, teacher, Universal Forms, Vedic origins, www.janetlevine.com, yoga

On April 7, PBS broadcast a two-hour documentary “Buddha” a journey through the life and times of the historical Buddha who lived in north eastern Indian two thousand five hundred years ago. The documentary is also an introduction to his teachings. One of the commentators extols the four sites of great importance for Buddhists and anyone interested in his teachings. The Buddha was born in Lumbini on the Nepal-India border, he found enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, gave his first teaching at Sarnath (near Varanasi) and died at Kushinigar.

Varanasi, River Ganges, India (© Janet Levine, 2007)

On a month-long journey to India and Nepal in 2007, I visited all four places and many others and can attest to the power of the Buddha’s presence, nowhere more powerfully (for me) than in Bodh Gaya in remote, desolate Bihar province.

At the same time as this PBS airing was receiving notice, I was teaching the timeless novel by Hermann Hesse “Siddartha” to two sections of high school juniors. In his novel Hesse follows the journey of a fictional Indian prince, Siddartha, and cleverly illumines for western readers some of Buddhism’s key teachings. I teach this book following on a unit on “Hamlet”, a precocious Western prince struggling with all the depression, anxiety and angst that causes so much suffering in the mind structures of the human condition as we understand it in the west. This Eastern prince searches for happiness, inner peace and enlightenment. He learns to trust his own inner teacher, the same voice inside himself that is heard throughout nature and governs the universal laws that keeps the earth on its axis and the great spiral of our cosmos swirling in limitless space. He teaches the “middle way” neither too tight nor too loose. These are eastern mind structures.

Throughout the “Siddartha” reading students kept an “ideas” journal;  informal, personal responses to some of the ideas they are encountering for the first time. Reading these journals is rewarding. None more so than the student who wrote of understanding one’s destiny as being a path to greatness, of being arrogant enough to unleash that greatness into the world, of knowing that every human being is capable of finding that greatness inside oneself. Buddhism teaches that this greatness is called achieving buddhahood, reflecting into the world the radiant enlightenment the Buddha achieved under the bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya. Nelson Mandela famously quoted Marilyn Williamson

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

But the Buddha also taught that the greatness is not greatness at all but ordinariness, the ordinariness of a hot cup of tea on a frosty morning, washing the dishes, taking out the trash and seeing the moon rise. The ordinariness of the courage of getting out of bed every morning and doing what you do every day. The ordinariness of responding to a stranger’s smile. And most importantly the ordinariness of living in the present moment, of being aware to everyone and everything in every moment.

Tags: Children, creativity, human rights, meditation, mind structure, Mind-training