Bodhisattva Healing Arts is a lifestyle, as much as it is a place to come to meet your inner healer, that powerful essence within you, calling you from deep within your heart to be your loving best self to yourself. Most of what we encounter in the world today is about ambition, productivity, and proving our worth. It is an illusion, distracting us from the primordial essence of our being and it is precisely why people are tired, anxious, diseased, distressed, and unfulfilled. All of these goals are subverting our deepest inner call for peace, gentleness, compassion, generosity, and love.
Apparently, you have had enough of this because you found yourself here. I am devoted believer of intuition being a guiding inner light so I encourage you to trust this, lean in, and step into the mystery now, that has found you here.
Here’s why. This is my story.
Bodhisattva Healing Arts is my private practice for my own life and the compassionate service I offer to myself and to my clients, women and their families, called to the grace of gentle living in a chaotic world. At the heart of the practice is paradox—that seemingly absurd situation where we have to be peace to have peace, be happy to feel happy, be healthy to experience good health. Each step on the path produces results that can perplex and delight us, confuse us and enrich us, and through it all, we walk on, deeper into the paradox, because it is living within the mystery that we can find within what we truly seek outside of ourselves.
Living has taught me to recognize the Three Gates™ that must be entered for transformation:
The Body, because we are human, living in a body,
The Mind, because we have one, and left to its own devices can be quite unruly, and
The Spirit, because we are more than flesh, primordial energy.
The Three Gates™ are entered at different times for people. I entered the first gate of Mind through a very chaotic early childhood family dynamic. My mind was set in patterns of beliefs that were very limiting, naturally self protective, physically compromising, and spiritually diminishing. The beauty of my young mind was that it knew nonsense when it saw it and heard it, so I was always a resister, but after awhile resistance took its toll and the fee was paid in the neurological changes to my brain due to stress.
Stress changes our brain to the point that we can no longer see the world as a safe place to trust, but encounter the ongoing badgering of our limbic system engaged in the fight or flight loop, challenging us with every thought and action to be “safe” and not to “stick out”. Thus, I made decisions from fear and began to limit my ability to choose within the framework of a free, creative, dynamic mind.
My Body got into the game when I was thirty-five years old and in a near fatal car accident. My son was just two years old, I was a single mother, I lost my lucrative talent agency business, and I was broken physically beyond anything that the doctors I saw, and insurance companies covering me, could or would recognize. All of the damage was under the skin—no broken bones, no external bleeding. I was riddled with massive inflammation and internal damage to the soft tissue throughout my body, the muscles, tendons, ligaments, and fascial connective tissue, and my brain was concussed to the point I could barely think, plunging me into a dangerous depression that we know and recognize today as characteristic of a serious internal brain injury. Everything I had to shore up my ego, security, and safety, dissolved within a month and I was adrift in the unknown without a boat to float in. Desperate, this was when I called out to God and said, “if you can hear me, I need help. Please help me, I don’t know what to do.”
Now, my Spirit was getting into the game, calling forth something bigger that I could have never imagined. All my mind and body knew was that it wanted to live, to get out of this horrendous constant pain, but my spirit remembered HOW to live. Through the chaos of the pain, I heard a quiet, affirming, Voice respond to my deep inner cry,
“Get the phone book,” it offered.
My eyes searched around the room for the source of the Voice, which I knew was utterly absurd, but I looked around anyway for a form to associate with the Voice as I followed the Voice and picked up the phone book. It was 1996, and I was briefly staying with a cousin in the San Francisco East Bay where the yellow pages directory was nearly four inches thick.
I decided there was nothing to lose so I placed the yellow pages on the kitchen counter before me and said,
“OK, now what?”, I asked back.
“Physical therapist!” was the next direction.
There were probably twenty pages of physical therapists and I went to the first part of the PT section and automatically placed my index finger on the first name and asked,
“Which one?”
I have no idea whatever possessed me to do that since I had never had the experience like this before and it was so automatic I didn’t give it a second thought. I began to draw my fingers down across each name in each column of the page, turning page after page, in silence, until I finally turned over a page and heard,
“STOP! Call that one!”, the Voice instructed
--MaLai Farrell, MS, PT. Backcare, Physical Therapy, and Rehabilitation--
I called, a nice man answered, I explained I wanted to see Ms. Farrell due to injuries sustained in a car accident. He took the message and said she would return the call shortly. I was in no way prepared for the demanding woman that called back an hour later.
In a very thick Chinese accent, this strong, barking voice said,
“HELLO! THIS MaLai Farrell. WHY you CALL ME!”
Her voice was so strong I wondered if I had awaked a Goddess or demon or something. I said,
“I had a bad car accident, I hurt everywhere, and I need someone to help me heal myself so I can live again.”
“WHO refer YOU to ME?”
“God, I think…”
“GOD!!! I so pissed at GOD! I ask God help me and he sit on his ass and do nothing! Why you so LUCKY you find me?”
I snorted, cracking up with laughter, maybe the first laughter I had in six weeks, and instantly fell in love with this crazy woman on the other end of the phone.
“LISTEN to ME!” she said. “You want to WORK with ME, you betta be rea-D WORK HARD!!! YOU MUST DO AS I SAY!!!! Insurance company give me HARD TIME, most time, and if you not WORK HARD and DO WHAT I SAY, then I dis-chaag you, YOU UNDERSTAN ME?!!!”
This woman was not messing around. I had never encountered a person like this and everything within me, every aching cell in my pulverized body screamed,
“YES!”
“Yes”, I said, "I understand and I am ready." I was ready but I had no idea what I was getting into, I had no idea I was meeting what was, quite possibly, the greatest living working physical therapist, healer really, on the planet. I had no idea I would receive direct transmission through her touch that, at times, felt like it was going to kill me. I had no idea I would heal all of my body, except my brain, better than I was before the accident. I had no idea I would weep when receiving the touch of Nancy, MaLai’s mentor, carrier of this lineage, and I really had no idea I would encounter two spirit beings, the master of the lineage, and the guardian of the lineage. All of that was nothing that I ever could have imagined, but it happened.
This story is still writing me. This story of living and healing writes me every day and it is through surrender, devotion and discipline, which I do not come by naturally, and "WORK HARD!!!" to integrate the process, so that my every thought, word, and deed can be reformed into something gracious and useful that I can share with others. I am just a student, following as faithfully as I can, this gracious path of the Three Gates™ of wisdom passed to me by my great teachers. All of my parts are engaged now, and it is my commitment to hold the best space for you to heal that I possibly can. All of what I know has been tested and fired within my body, my mind, and my spirit, and the lives of others that humbled themselves to a greater force and have passed on their good work to me, to share with you.
In Peace,
Patricia Anahata Little, BS, LMT
You get one brain, one body. Treat them well.™
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