Being God
Step #1 Find out who you are. You are your body, you are your soul, you are your life. Include everything, and everything becomes an expression of you. Exclude it – and it becomes an expression of your trauma.
Step #2 Include death into your life. Death is wonderful, it is a graduation, a transition, as much as birth. What’s there to be sad about? What’s there to grieve about?
Step #3 Choose. Do not wait for God, universe, spirit, purpose, destiny, authorities or society to do it for you.
Step #4 Be present to what you are creating, right now. Before you learn how to create what you want, realize how you created what you have.
Step #5 Do not think. What you want is not the result of your thoughts but an expression of what you are.
Step #6 Travel far. When your background changes you see what is only you, in sharp relief.
Step #7 Believe what you say you believe.
Step #8 Don’t lie. Not to yourself, not to others. Never.
Step #9 Consider the possibility of your future being entirely different than your past.
Step #10 Go find out what you want, don’t wait until it finds you.
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I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to consider, don’t want to think of mentors in my life. There is a wall of resistance, a feisty child stomping her foot in protest – you will not tell me what to do!
You will not tell me what to do. No teacher ever had. There weren’t all that many of them, maybe that’s why, maybe I never wanted any.
My first Zen teacher – I stayed with her only because she opened the door wide and said: stay or leave, it’s all the same to me. I stayed. [click to continue…] 
My first life began when I was born. A little being that jumped out of my mother’s womb into a cold, dark night. Winters come early to Poland, the evenings of October are long and gloomy, wet with freezing rains, slippery with sleet that will soon turn into snow. The white snow will cover dusty streets and sooty, dirty buildings, smoothing the edges, sparkling brilliantly in the lamplight. For a few days, for a few weeks, the city will turn into fairyland. But it was not a fairy land that I saw when I first opened my eyes. The world was cold and dark, and I was scared.
My second life began when I sat on a train. It was a summer evening, golden and brilliant, heavy with the scents of flowers and weeds and sharp smell of hot iron train trucks and railroad ties covered with soft tar. As the train made it’s stately progress through the countryside I read my way through a book. It was a book about soothsayers, about the world of those who can see beyond time, beyond space, about the world where the truth is known. The book said: “all is one”, and my head snapped up, like that of a dog on a scent.
“I knew that!” I realized, “I always knew that! I must have forgotten!”
On that day I remembered that there is more in the world than my life, than my college friends, my boyfriend, my clothes and my troubles. On that day I have decided to look. [click to continue…] 
It was a joke at first, you see. Or I thought it was. My yearning for magic could be nothing else after all. Chasing elven tracks in forests, looking under bushes, searching among the flower petals for fluttering fairies – I knew they were there, even as I knew they weren’t. They couldn’t be, everyone knows there is no such thing as magic. I knew that. But I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t want the gray, cold, lonely world where every step brought danger, where one false move meant disaster. I wanted elven pointed ears and fairy’s light step.
And so when you said that there is a wizard living nearby, one that will turn me into an elf, I knew it was a joke. But I took the number anyway. And I made the phone call.
I drove to see the wizard few days later. It was cold and misty up in the mountains, fog swirled in the canyon where the wizard lived shrouding the rushing river, the ancient oaks, the lofty pines. It was as it should be, I thought, climbing up a narrow path, up the mountain slope to a little cabin. It was just right for the master to live up on top of the mountain and for the disciples to climb up and claim the teachings. Claim the magic for themselves. [click to continue…] 
The rocks were warm. Sunned for hours, they soaked up the heat and stored it within their glowing hearts. It radiated softly through their porous skin. “It feels so pleasant”, I thought, as I run up, jumping from rock to rock, from shelf to shelf, hardly touching the surface in my light slippers. “Like an elf”, I thought. It felt so pleasant to climb lightly and recklessly, higher and higher, up and onward and away from the road, away from the valley, away from the cabins and the coking fires.
What looked like a wall broken into shelves, formed into steps by fallen boulders, climbing steadily upwards, turned out to be an entire world, a landscape of deep valleys and sharp peaks, of smooth-floored meadows overgrown by silvery grass, and forests of brush with their sharp, pointy branches and small shiny leaves. There were rocks as large as a head of a giant lying where they feel, with deep crevices left where they split on impact.
It was quiet there, alien, the human world was only a story and I felt uneasy. I begun to walk slowly, climb cautiously, choosing the gentlest slopes and surest assents. No more running and jumping recklessly. I did not belong there. One false step, and the mountain would shake me off with hardly a flicker of it’s rocky fingers. [click to continue…] 
