A Bigger Sky by Pamela Weiss

Author:Pamela Weiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623174767
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2020-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

8

Everything Changes

This was my moment.

There were two hundred people—speakers, seekers, and the press—piled into the old hops barn at a biodynamic vineyard in Northern California for a three-day conference. I had spent months preparing for thirty minutes on stage, to share the story of PEP.

I clipped on my mic and set down my notes. I looked out across the faces of the audience seated in front of me. I glanced back at the giant screen behind me, which showed an image of a tree trunk with mottled gray bark and wide green leaves, inscribed with the words, “Listening to the Sycamores.” I was here to talk about PEP, but when my friend Anna invited me to come, she warned: “This is not a sales pitch for PEP. You need to tell a personal story.”

I said to the audience, “So how did a middle-class Jewish girl from Berkeley, California, end up in a Zen monastery?” And then I told the story of my diagnosis and the battle to make peace with my body. I conjured a picture of life at Tassajara: “Imagine me with a buzz cut, wearing long, draping black robes,” I said, grinning. I talked about the sounds and the silence: bells and drums, blue jays and stones underfoot, the background splash and burble of the creek. I described my confusion when the sound of the creek changed overnight from a tinkle to a roar, and the old monk telling me: “It’s the sycamores.”

“Yes, there is a scientific explanation for what happened,” I said. “But that doesn’t begin to capture the sense of amazement and wonder I felt. Not then, not now—almost two decades later.”

I paused.

“I think the reason the memory of those trees has stayed with me for all these years is because it reveals something we all know but are often too busy to remember: that we are part of a shimmering web of life, a web that connects the trees to the creek, and us to the trees, and all of us to each other and to the world.”

When I looked out, every face was rapt.

“So I have lots of data to ‘prove’ that PEP is successful. I can give you stats about improved employee satisfaction and engagement, and increased ROI. But none of that is what made PEP tick,” I explained. “What is at the heart of PEP is the understanding that if we quiet ourselves and take the time to listen, we have the opportunity to remember the truth of our deep interconnectedness.”

I glanced back at an image of a spider’s web sparking with dew, spread across the screen behind me. I looked out and watched a woman in the second row bent over her notebook, scribbling notes.

I said, “So I’d like to give you a direct taste of this, of how to listen deeply.”

I waited.

The note scribbling stopped.

“Let your eyes close gently, and take a few deep, full breaths,” I said. “Let your attention settle into the immediacy of the felt sense of the body.

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