“‘Are you sick?’ Jai asked. When I couldn’t articulate a response, Jai said to tap with the phone, once if I was okay, twice if I needed help. I kept tapping…. I was having a stroke.” The journey back from that devastating event, recounted in this Summer 2021 issue of Parabola by the late spiritual teacher Ram Dass, reveals that wellness does not exclude suffering.
Within these pages, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky imagines rituals of healing for a community traumatized by political violence. Yet what becomes clear is that becoming really and truly well is always personal, always demanding a deep encounter. “My way may not be your way,” writes Parabola consulting editor Patty de Llosa. “My dream is certainly not your dream.”
Many of those different ways, those different dreams that spur us on to find new depths are explored in this issue. The roads we take may lead from pain or wonder. In these pages you will read of the breakthroughs that came in the midst of physical pain and respiratory illness and plague and also of shamanic transformations and great spiritual quests—Michael Scott Alexander describes great Islamic scholar Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali’s road to a Sufi teacher in old Damascus. Ultimately all roads lead to Being. No matter our causes and conditions, wellness begins as we realize that we are more than we think we are, more than our stories about ourselves.
“When we are asleep to Being, our attention becomes entranced by mind—the vast array of ideas, images, beliefs, habits, and judgments we have been conditioned to identify as self,” writes the contemporary spiritual teacher Adyashanti. “However, these are not self; they are conditioned psychological processes masquerading as who you are.”
May this issue set you on the road to wellness.
—Tracy Cochran
