May/June 2003 Spirituality
A Toltec in the Middle East

by Kelsey Bunker

The day before I was set to leave for one of the most volatile regions on the earth war did not seem imminent, so I packed my bags and jumped on my first plane. The next day I landed in Bahrain. The three-day workshop had filled up prior to my arrival. What was the content of the workshops I facilitated?

Basically the message I delivered was one of peace and love. From the Toltec point of view everything outside of us is simply a manifestation of our inner world. The conflict we see in the Middle East is no different from the inner conflict we experience daily. The admonitions, the coercing, the shaming, and the threats that go on in our minds are the same types of behavior we see our President exhibiting on behalf of the United States. In order to change your world, you begin by changing yourself. The next question always is: how do you change? Toltecs believe that the quickest way to transformation is to begin by looking at your personal belief systems. Identifying your belief system, what you believe and where each belief came from, is an eye-opening experience. A belief is anything that has a component of right or wrong, good or bad, better or worse.

Although I taught women of ten different nationalities and four major religious affiliations, Christian, Muslim, Hindi, and Buddhist, each person recognized that she had been socialized or domesticated according to her culture. The process of domestication is the infusion of a belief system into one’s consciousness. Parents, teachers, religious leaders, family and friends all contribute their own individual belief systems to this process. And in every instant we believe what other people tell us about who we are AND deep down, we somehow know that we aren’t what they say we are. This piece of information alone was huge relief for many of the women in the workshop. We spent a good deal of time in the workshop helping each other uncover some of our beliefs. The discovery of the depth of one’s belief system was quite a shock to most of the participants. It really did not matter what each person believed because regardless of which culture someone grew up in, the commonality was that the belief system each person had adapted in truth was not her own, and in fact most of the times, when carefully examined it was discovered that most beliefs were arbitrary at best and generally false. Simply understanding these concepts led people to a greater sense of ease. What they had sensed about who they really were, was affirmed. They weren’t who everyone else said they were.

The other point covered was that their resistance to the present moment is what creates suffering. As a whole when we go through life we are constantly judging and measuring our lives. Does our life look like we think it should? Is this situation better or worse than that situation? Anytime we have a pleasurable experience we usually want to cling to it. We measure all of our other experiences against that pleasurable experience and anytime it comes up short we admonish ourselves and punish ourselves. The minute we begin to experience a situation that might be called uncomfortable, we label it as, for example, sadness and then every memory of every event that we labeled "sad" comes rushing into our consciousness and soon, within milliseconds, we are thinking about these experiences and not feeling the present moment at all. The thinking puts us into the land of virtual reality, into the space inside our head. It has nothing to do with reality at all. Most people live the majority of their lives in their very own virtual reality based on past memories. People will often dispute this claim, but what they mistake for reality is really just a different way of telling the same old story about a new event.

What was surprising to me was how receptive each person was to this message, to the idea that we aren’t what we think we are and that it is our resistance to what is that creates hell, both in our internal and external world. As you can imagine, many tears were shed (it is sad to realize how brutal we are to ourselves, how much violence we excuse when we use it on ourselves and how long we have been doing this to ourselves) and much love blossomed and spread throughout this diverse group of women. Each person left with a little better understanding of herself and the experience of forgiveness for all that she had done to herself and the love that is her birthright. After spending three days together, including staying up all night for a nightlong dream ceremony, one of the participants said she felt a sense of peace that had been missing for years. Everyone nodded in affirmation. Hopefully this sense of peace within translates to a sense of peace in the outside world.

Kelsey Bunker is an apprentice with don Miguel Ruiz and currently teaches classes in the Portland area on the Four Agreements. For more information call 503/288-4229 or email bunkerk@msn.com.