Tory’s legacy

Hello dear Light’ers,
One of the dearest people in my life – friend, therapist, and Buddhist teacher – is Tory Capron.  Tory’s been a friend for 20+ years, and is one of the most light-full people I’ve ever met, along with being a force of nature in all she does, including outdoor adventures.  Earlier this year, Tory was diagnosed with ALS (we think she’s had it for at least a year already), and likely has anywhere from a year or a bit more left on this Earth.

Being the teacher and role model that she is, for me and so many others, she’s using her illness and her dying process as both a high form of spiritual practice and an opportunity to teach her students and others about one way to face one’s eventual death…hers is just knowingly closer than not.  To help keep people connected to her and her teachings/experiences, she’s been writing emails to her mailing list updating us all on her experiences with the disease and with her life.  Anadi asked if he could share Tory’s last update to all of us in her community and sangha, which I am happy to see happen here.  She’s inspired me beyond words with how she’s dealing with this, even as my heart is broken that she’s having to face this.  

So, my hope is that you will find it inspiring as a human and as a part of a Community of Light.

With love,
Geoff

Thank you Geoff for including us and for your generosity and compassion. We appreciate and welcome your introduction to Tory’s so inspiring message to her friends and, in fact, all of us. How naked and vulnerable Tory is exposing her Self and sharing everything that is moving her at this stage of her life in such desperate situation, where living and dying is not separate anymore. Liberation!

It is such an offering to everyone of us reading Tory’s (so far) legacy, because it helps triggering our awakening and it deepens our insight and learning. What a tremendous gift! Thank you again.
Our hearts are reaching out to her and her family and her close friends.

Bowing down
Anadi & Shakti

I love you so very much

Greetings Beloved Ones.

My God, this is a long email !!!!!!   
Who the hell sends such a long email and expects anyone to read it!    
Well certainly not me so if you just decide right now to pass this one on, I will not hold it against you! And if you decide to read it, maybe take it in in little bites. My writing is not only to update all of you since many are asking me how I am, but also as a source of check in to myself for myself. 
 
       Most importantly………thank you all for your care, your love, your endless support, your offers to help, your tears and humor and just for being in my life in all the ways you are. I cherish you.  
 
       It has only been a month and a half since I last wrote but since my life is changing so remarkably fast, time does not feel normal. Bodhi and I left on July 25th in my van for a month long road trip to touch life and death more intimately, to be in the natural world and to be with family and a few friends along the way. And, to do an adventure by myself as this will most likely be the last time I can do something like this alone.  

       This trip has been much for challenging than I expected. I am exhausted by everything… the long drives, finding places to camp, endless transitions, etc etc. The grief that meets me daily is intense and often surprising. So many endings. I have had to reevaluate daily if I should continue and either drive home, fly home and get someone to drive my van without me or just get someone to come finish the trip with me. As of now I will just slow everything down, cut out what I can and keep listening. I will get a friend to drive the final leg home after the family reunion in Tahoe mid August. Presently I am on Whidbey with sister Kim and family and it is nourishing. I am getting how being home with a rhythm, structure, the nourishing things for my body (sleep, exercise that is good for me, body work, acupuncture, quiet, etc) if what I need. And it is so good to see my beloveds on this trip and say goodbye to places that I have loved so deeply. This is such a journey!!!!!!!

        Before I Ieft for the trip I decided to stop seeing private clients so that I could focus on this mysterious journey I seem to be on and to dive in to a creative piece that I am working on that I see as my final offering and teaching. I have now seen my last client and since the ending was abrupt for both my clients and me, it was disorienting to say the least. I am staying true to my intuitive voice and so I listened when on that one day I woke up and knew I was done working as a therapist in this way. 25 years of being a therapist so to end suddenly is rather wild. I will be leading a group for a bit which I look forward to but primarily I will be teaching and working on my creative inspiration, attending to this journey and just plain listening.  
      
My creative piece will be a film combining my teachings on death and resilience and my love for the human body in the natural world and much more but I will wait for you to see it before I share too much. I am excited and daunted by the project. I have never done anything like this and I feel an urgency pushing me to get this done while I still can.   

      Many of you have asked how my psyche is doing and how am I handling this process of my dissolution.   Here is my best at describing what my experience is.

Liberation

I am unraveling, becoming undone. And simultaneously I am becoming. I am consciously letting the unraveling happen so that the becoming has room.
To unravel means…….to undo, untangle, unsnarl, unwind,
To unravel is to reveal what is exposed , what is hidden, when the tangle is loosened.

In becoming undone I am freer, less daunted by the challenges, more able to let go, freer from my sense of my identities, from my defense mechanisms, from a checked out heart, more cutting to the chase, more living close to the bone. And in the becoming…..becoming more of my fundamental nature, becoming more identified with soul than with ego, I am becoming more undomesticated and able to find the humor in most everything. I am becoming more aware and identified with that which never dies. I am loving much more deeply.

I experience physical changes daily….more weakness in my extremities, more cramps, more balance problems, more disfunction in my hands. Walking is becoming more and more difficult. I am slowly losing my voice which means I am having more difficulty articulating words. I am slurring my speech more often. I get extremely tired at times.

I need a brace on my leg to make walking easier. All of this can be very frustrating as doing simple things takes me a very long time and can be exasperating. And I see that soon even these simple things will not be possible for me to do at all. That can inspire feelings of such a loss of control. I often am shocked by what is happening. My muscles are atrophying quickly and I am losing weight. I look quite thin.

I am still exercising in some form daily either swimming, riding my e-bike or walking. I stretch as often as I can. Finding a balance between the need to keep my muscles moving and not freezing up (recommended by my docs) balanced with not overdoing is a perfectly imperfect process. Everyday is different. Having been an athlete my whole life this is such a process of letting go.

I have endless curiosity and am fascinated with the entire process……physically, mentally, spiritually. I can laugh at it, cry at it, be amazed at it, be so curious at the whole dang thing. Thank god for this!!!!!!

I am having to set up all the systems …….voice activated email, banking my voice, messaging my voice (both for being able to synthesize my voice for later when I can not speak), setting up eye gaze so I can type with my eyes, getting gizmos for assisting with household items, figuring out wheelchair kinds and how to remodel my house. Setting up disability and medicare. Everything is fast tracked when you have ALS as the life expectancy is so short I am overwhelmed at times with all this. But I have done as much as I can at this point until I need more care.

When I am afraid I get as close to the fear as I can. I look it right in the face and feel it, get to know it, not pushing it away or grabbing it, then it does not have a grip on me. I taste it and roll around in it and then realize it has already dissolved because I did not let it be in control. It was not about what was happening right here and now. It was about what is in the future. I do not pick things back up when they move through.

I am finding that I am being confronted with more loss and having to let go of more and more things at a faster and faster pace. There are more endings, more coming to terms with all the things I will never do or never see or be with again. I let the sadness of this touch my heart. So many endings.

I have to stay on the razor edge more precisely. The longing is stronger and so the pull off the edge is greater, but the satisfaction on the edge is more profound and more complete. Traveling demands more paying attention as the pull of the edge is more constant.

I cry more easily. Most often it is from a feeling of such profound love. Everything I look at breaks my heart open with love. I realize my heart has been a little closed and protected for much of my life or not as open anyway which I now understand is so normal for all of us until we get that we are so mortal.

I feel this love as the most essential and intelligent creative energy underlying everything. I am seeing it generates everything. And we are inseparable from it. We are it. It is not like attached love or romantic love but a force that moves existence. It is very intimate. Even the so called negative things that happen are invitations to touch this force. It pushes me to open further. if I listen carefully I can sense this constant pull to this energy. It lies right under all the confusion of my mind.

I am seeing how easy it is to forgive and accept and appreciate when life feels so finite. It is easier to let go. To relax into this. I get how essential it is to forgive. That forgiving is part of the deep process of letting go.

I grief more fully and cleanly. When I bear the unbearable I see more fully and let go more deeply, it gives me strength and courage. It washes thru like a thunderstorm and when it is finished it is done. And the grief is coming at me more and more, faster and faster.

I live closer to the bone. Everything is closer to the bone. Just so close.

I really see how consciousness itself is unbroken and indestructible and that this life is just one small experience among an unending journey of experiences and at the conclusion of this experience I call this life, I will simply slip out of my Tory body and relax once more into a larger existence.

I try to say “ of course” when I get terrified or overwhelmed or sad. Of course I would feel this way. Tender tender.

I see that to know of my mortality, really know it in my bones, is the only way to wake up. If we don’t know of our mortality then we just go merrily on our way and stay hooked in our ego without even knowing it. I can feel the pull, the momentum to wake up. This is a gift.

I Listen, deeply, often and have so much more listening to do.

I can feel the death process, this force of nature, as an energetic force, not a concept. It is pulling me. Sometimes I wonder if I am too curious, too open to death, not fighting it off enough. I don’t think so as it is my intuitive body telling me the path to follow. ALS is not curable.

I choose the clear, clean, honest path or turning toward my death rather than spinning out on turning toward hope. …….. one of the gifts of this pretty awful disease.

I rest in koan “not knowing is most intimate”. I feel in my body the intimacy with all things when I give up trying to know, trying to nail things down, trying to solidify me, my thoughts, my projections, life, others.

Every time I want to tighten, I try to relax. Relax. I know I will die, I know nothing else really with my mind. I know so much in my heart.

I try to rest in what is not effected by ALS. The source. This is where I find total peace and grace and lack of all fear.

More and more I feel the grace in the knowing I am the right person, in the right place at the right time. I don’t question this.

I have to allow people to help me more often. Like a lot!!!!! I say yes and thank you and don’t apologize or explain. Just yes and thank you. I realize it is a gift to others to serve.

I contemplate often what the 3rd zen patriarch said…….“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.”

I am letting life and death be a seamless thread in the tapestry of life. Like getting up in the morning and going to bed at night.

I want to leave without even an orange.
I am renouncing and want to renounce enough to let life enter me. I am slowly giving all my books away. Want a few? And soon all of my belongings will be given away.

When I lose my voice I will be given the gift of the 3 year retreat I wanted to do, if I live that long, which I strongly doubt. And I am afraid to lose my voice. It is my primary way of serving the world and feeling my connection. I will have to explore the many other ways of connecting.

I focus on gratitude. I am so grateful for all of you in my life.

I am feeling a sense of completion. Meaning…..I don’t feel the need to seek, or improve or transform anything in me anymore. Not that I am perfect for sure but that I am complete in who I am. I am enough. With all my foibles, warts and farts. What a fucking relief!!!!!!!

As two of my primary teachers have said, It is a hard life if you don’t soften, dropping your armor, to become more round. Life hurts if I am angular because when I am life meets me back in an angular way. So I am letting myself soften, open and allow the medicine of my life to heal everything that is not aligned with life’s truths. I know that the truth of reality beyond my knowing has the power to liberate my mind, fill my heart, feed my soul and give me more life, even in the face of my own death. I have a choice in every moment how I receive life, how I meet it. I am not perfect but I feel I am doing a pretty good job in the choices I am making.
I am finding that by letting down my armor I am more available for joy. I went camping for my birthday with 12 dear friends and had one of the best times of my whole life. I felt so much joy.

I am seeing that to live in a noble way we need to have a good heart, a good mind, courage and strength. “Good”, to me, means humble, open, authentic, clear. My prayer lately has been “Help me to see through the eye of my heart”. This prayer helps me remember that life’s infinite and universal truth is there exists a reality that lies beneath, around, through and beyond the precious human constructs and collected apparitions that so thoroughly beguile and bedevil us with their charms-our culture and politics, classes and economies, desires and hopes, fears and complaints, categories and dualities, thoughts and opinions, entertainments and interests, and ideas of righteousness and justice. My thoughts about life are not life. My prayer helps me remember this.

So, like water, I am listening, softening, making corrections, listening again, adjusting course, opening, yielding, listening and then once again finding the easier way. I hope I am becoming more humble in the process having let life grind the sharp edges down so that I meet life more round. I know for sure I am happier and kinder, more allowing and available, more struck with the waves of grief and loss and thus more ground down once again. May this just continue until I take my last breath.

I hope this can find each of you so well in your unique lives.
I love you so very much. Thank you thank you thank you thank you, endlessly thank you.

Tory