Quote - Bob Dylan

"All I can do is be me, whoever that is." Bob Dylan

Quote - Sri Chinmoy

"There is nothing wrong with your goals and plans - just don't love them too much." Sri Chinmoy

Quote

"Life is too short to drink cheap beer." Majo

LIFE LIVED MORE DEEPLY - One More Feeble Attempt To Wrap Words Around It

Life Lived More Deeply is not a discipline or a path or a teaching or a paradigm. It is an experience.

It is not an experience which can be developed or created or controlled. It is a gift. We cannot even intentionally cultivate gratitude for this experience. When we do observe gratitude for the experience, that too is a gift. “Just thank the thanking when it comes.”

Key to this Life Lived More Deeply experience is a melting away of the experience of separation. We “drop down into” the flow of life and know – if only for a moment – that we are nothing other than Life, which is everything. We, in that moment, let go of trying to do or be anything. We trust – trust Life, trust the moment, trust our life.

Any attempt to hold on to this experience or to “do” it more often will only increase the hold of the ego – the part of us that thinks it is the doer, that attempts to run our lives.

We will know that the experience of Live Lived More Deeply is taking root in us when we observe ourselves letting go of all dichotomies – good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, me vs. them.

Even the classic spiritual dichotomy of love vs. fear begins to be exposed as adversarial. “Love is good and fear is bad.” From the perspective of the unitive experience, fear is no less valuable than love. It is all part of the dance, part of the unfolding of our humanity, part of our connection with the rest of humanity and even the rest of the animal kingdom.

If, as A Course in Miracles says, fear is the core emotion underlying all other unpleasant feelings, then we get really curious about and loving towards this experience of fear in all its forms. Life Lived More Deeply would suggest that it is counterproductive to follow any program which pits love against fear, which attempts to uproot fear and replace it with love.

If there is one spiritual “practice” that has relevance to the unfolding of Life Lived More Deeply, it would be the ancient Buddhist practice of tonglen, popularized recently by Pema Chodron. In this practice, rather than “breathe in the good, breathe out the bad” as the New Agers would recommend, we breathe in whatever pain we are feeling – drink it in deeply, feel it as fully as we can, pay attention to all its nuances. We then breathe out a wish for our healing from this painful state. The next, crucial step in this practice is to breathe in that painful feeling for all our suffering brothers and sisters who are experiencing this same kind of pain – most of whom have nowhere near our resources for coping with it – then breathe out a wish for their healing also, not just our own.

But Life Lived More Deeply would encourage that we not even “practice” tonglen. To attempt to “develop” this practice will again only reinforce the idea that “I” am some separate thing, capable of “doing” things, of steering the boat. From this perspective, we notice the tonglen experience when it is happening – including when we are reading about it, listening to a CD about it, or hearing a teacher describe it or take us through it. We are grateful for this experience as it is happening and notice how it may melt our struggle against the painful emotion. Observing it fully and being grateful for it may open the space in us for it to return. But when we crave even this experience of tonglen we get back on the wheel of attachment. And when we start to create a program around it – even the intention to repeat the tonglen practice – the ego digs in deeper. If, tomorrow, we notice ourselves sit in a chair and go back to the tonglen experience, this may be beautiful – and gratitude is a wonderful response to seeing this shining, free moment unfold. When we think that we in any way did it, we wander back into the woods.

Radical Integrity

We are neither human beings having a spiritual experience nor spiritual beings having a human experience. This contrast between spiritual and human is a false dichotomy and sets up all the other forms of dualism. When we understand this, we can more and more just drop into the fullness of our humanity. Some Native American groups call people they especially respect a “real human being”.

One of the great paradoxes of human life is that, while we are absolutely one with all of life, which is one big tapestry containing all of us, we still have our own sparkling individuality – and our path into oneness unfolds through our own uniqueness. Thus there are as many paths up the mountain as there are unique beings. Any “spiritual” or personal growth path can potentially open up for us another shining facet of being human. But no one path, discipline, teacher or holy book can adequately contain or express who we are. We are meant to learn what is there for us in this particular path and then move on – at least internally, even if we maintain our connection with that path (or church) as part of our spiritual community.

Integrity here refers not to ethics, but to integrating all the different elements of who we are – and “radical integrity” means an unqualified commitment to this unfolding, making it more important than any other purpose for our lives. To attempt to remain a student of a particular path or teacher – whether A Course in Miracles or gestalt therapy or Majo John Madden or Buddhism or Jesus – after we have learned what we were there for, will ultimately be confining and confusing.

(The Buddha said, “Doubt everything – find your own light.” I feel sure that he would have included Buddhism in this principle and that he no more intended to create a religion than did Jesus.)

We can be “inspired” by all these teachers, paths or religions – they can give us breath or wind beneath our sails – but they are not the boat. This we craft, bit by bit, as we discover our own path through this life.

New age/old age - Quote for the day 11/16/07

"No matter how New Age you get, old age is still going to kick your butt."

(Some male singer/songwriter on World Cafe 10/07 - I can't find the quote)

Thirty Thirty-nine (Majo John Madden, 9/15/07)

I love funky numbers – numbers that should be random, but come up looking like they are not. It seems to me that life uses these synchronicities, like others, to get our attention - to say: “Hey, wake up, pay attention. You may think that life is all chaos, but it’s not.” And I seem to see these kinds of fun, synchronistic numbers all the time.

Today at the gas station, I pointed out to the cashier (whom I know, a sweet older lady named Helen) that the total on the cash register from her previous customer was $66.99. “That’s a cool number. I like numbers and that’s a good one.” Helen, I think, is not into numbers quite as much as I. “Well, I guess it is. But yours is not as interesting.” The total from my gas purchase was $30.39. “No, that’s a pretty boring number.”

After the gas station, my next bit of shopping was at the health food store. When the cashier there rang up the total of my several purchases, with tax, the cash register showed $30.39.

Sometimes the deeper patterns under the surface chaos of things are not obvious – sometimes they never clarify themselves. But other times they need a little more distance to manifest. We need to step back a bit, get the view from 3000 feet rather than 30. Sometimes this “bigger picture” has to do not with physical distance, but a broader timeframe. In that first moment at the gas station, $30.39 seemed pretty unremarkable. It took the one-hour picture to show up that pattern.

And, obviously, some of these patterns require bigger time frames to show up. About thirty years ago, I was teaching a course on dreams. As I immersed myself in the topic, I kept (as I had during other periods) a notebook by my bed and journaled every dream I could remember. The further I got into this process, my unconscious seemed to cooperate by waking me up after each of several dreams per night. Often I would have one dream about a particular theme on a specific night – but then would return to this same theme on maybe my third dream of the night on several consecutive nights. Somehow, this little part of my unconscious was more organized and orderly than I might have expected.

It seems to me that the primary requirement to see these patterns is to really pay attention to the details of our “mundane” daily experience. The writer’s eye certainly helps with this, but anybody can cultivate the habit of more opening their eyes to the present moment. This heightened awareness of the here-and-now is actually the primary spiritual discipline and, in and of itself, is likely to add more depth, charm, fun and aliveness to our days.

And one of the ways this awareness discipline will enrich our days is by life winking at us as it points our attention to more of the thirty thirty-nines in our environment.

From Silver Bullets to Bulletin Boards (Majo John Madden, 10/24/07)

I was just talking with a friend who had recently my most recent Life Lived More Deeply mini-retreat. One of the many great things he said was that I had offered no answers, no silver bullets - and that a part of all of us is wishing and looking for these.

The writer in me lit up with another play on words: from silver bullets to bulletin boards. What if the world offers us not silver bullets but bulletin boards? Bulletin boards are kind of all over the place - the different stuff on them may not relate to each other at all and some of it, for us anyway, may be absolute crap.

It's up to us then, not to follow the leader, but to discern what is the next message for us, what is the next step. For me anymore, it's not about a method or a plan, but about the next step: move to this next spot and await further instructions. It may not be at all clear why we need to move there - why this item posted on the bulletin board speaks to us, but somehow it does.

The real discipline may be to not get trapped in our addiction to seeing or figuring out where it's all going - to voluntarily let go of the raft, plunge naked into life and "surrender all hope of ever again knowing which end is up." Here may be the only solid non-program, the real hero's path - not to tilt at windmills, but to voluntarily let go, one step at a time, of our mind-wills, our need to control it all.

My Body, My "Support System"

“Support system” can mean many different things to different people – or to the same person at different times or from different angles. Here is one of those angles.

My body is my contact point to the most potent support system to which I have access – the enormous power, richness and healing capacity of the present moment.

When I abandon my body and get lost in my thoughts, memories, plans, emotions, etc., I become hollow. My body, uninhabited, drifts without an anchor. It is a shell, unable to take nurturance from the environment – or to have any genuine engagement with its surroundings. And my mental being, unsupported by my body, wanders without a home - unprotected, unable to keep its bearings or to prevent thoughts or feelings from ballooning out of control.

When I can keep my attention grounded in my body, then – even while the ideas for this piece are erupting in my mind – I can put enough attention on pumping gas that I remember to put the gas cap on the passenger seat (the only location I have found that guarantees I will not drive off without it). I can also – while thinking about this piece and pumping gas – hear the cackle of a kingfisher from the stream just across the road. Kingfishers are one of my favorite birds: they swoop down rivers and streams, diving for fish and making this great racket while they fly. I have not seen one for a few years now, but have now heard one on two recent occasions. The very sound of this fabulous bird fills me with happiness and makes my environment, for me, measurably richer, more beautiful, more supportive of life.

If I stay anchored in my body, then – even while I sit on my porch with my laptop, writing these very words – I can be watching the pair of nuthatches (ok, did I deny that I am nuts about birds?) climbing upside down on the tree just beyond my porch, anchoring these words in the truth they describe.

I am completely supported by my environment in this present moment. My visual sense wants to see things as distant, separate. When I come back to my body, I can feel my feet on the ground, my clothing rubbing against my skin, the teensy movement of air on my skin. The sounds of the birds around me caress my ears. The late-summer smells wafting around my nose are quite clearly not distant – they are touching me.

The chair I am sitting on supports me – it keeps me from falling on the floor. It allows me to sit here at my little porch-desk, typing these words. If I pay a little attention, I can notice the sensations of the cushions supporting my butt and back – I can even make little micro-adjustments and feel them even more, can fine-tune just how good they feel, how well they support me.

When I tune deeply enough into my physical reality in the present moment, I can discover that my environment literally, physically supports me. Modern science has thoroughly refuted the illusion of separation, of empty space between hard objects. With electrons whizzing around at amazing speeds, objects have only a “tendency” to exist in a specific, limited space. And the seeming empty space between these objects is absolutely filled with living material. We are not alone – we are utterly connected with the life that is blooming and buzzing all around us. Martial artists know this and learn to work with the invisible energy in the field around them. Were I to fall over, I would not fall through empty space, but through and into more life.

Obviously, there are many more layers to my support system – the foods that I eat, the ideas I take in, the friends I keep, etc. But my body can help me better access these other layers:
· When I listen to my body, I can better know when I am genuinely hungry, whether this item that I am eating really feels/tastes right at this present moment, when I am really full (which, when I am not anchored in my body, often occurs well before I notice it).
· If I stay in my body, I am less likely to be tossed around by ideas. When I shuttle back and forth between my physical and mental realms, my thoughts tend to be somewhat clearer, a bit slower – and I know when I have had enough of them, when I need to get up/stretch/move around, when I need to breathe more.
· My body can give me cues about whether this particular person feels like a support or like a toxin at this particular moment, when I need a hug and when more separateness, when I need to seek contact and when to keep my own company.

I cannot control to what extent I can stay present in my body – any attempt to force this will quickly devolve into a mental exercise that directly interferes with grounding myself in present-moment awareness. What I can do (and even the word “do” is a misnomer here) is notice when I notice the present moment.
· When I happen to feel my feet on the ground, I can celebrate that.
· When I feel any physical sensations, I can even slightly let go of judging them as good or bad, pleasurable or less so – and simply notice them.
· When I hear the symphonic feast of sounds around me, I can let myself be really interested in them, can let my attention be drawn further into them – even while I continue to pump gas, type at my computer, etc. (OK, this “symphony of sounds” can tend to be way more fun out in the country where I live now than it is downtown where I used to live – but this focus used to and still can work for me down there, too.)

And, when none of these access points to my physical support system seem available to me – when I seem hopelessly mired in my thoughts, feelings, etc. – I can, as much as I am able, decline to judge this present moment. Judging is the big killer of present moment awareness of all kinds. Our capacity to pay attention is somewhat fragile and developmental, and becomes easily traumatized when it is criticized. Present moment physical awareness, and the whole host of supports to which it gives us access, will always return.

To the extent that we neither cling to nor resist whatever is in our here-and-now awareness, to that extent our awareness process will come naturally into balance. And we will come more into balance.

Barking Dogs

I live in the country. I have lived in the country before, but not for many years now. And never in Appalachia. I’m sure there are houses in these mountains where you can mostly not hear barking dogs – and I threaten sometimes that, when my one-year lease is up, I’m going to find me one. But meanwhile I’ve got these dogs. People leave their dogs out all night, and they are likely to bark at any time during the night or day. And, when one starts, they tend to croon to each other.


They don’t bark all the time. So I focus on these raucous sounds being temporary, and that they will help me appreciate the times of real quiet even more – and some of that actually is happening. Or I practice letting these sounds be just one more organic sound (not cars or trucks) and to simply let them float by, to not judge them – and sometimes that works.


But there are times when none of my various techniques works, when I just can’t seem to let these noises go into background or to stop judging them. Times during the night when they wake me up and/or keep me awake - and even earplugs don’t give me relief. Then I tend to get angry, which really doesn’t support sleep. Or times just sitting out on my front porch when I really, really would like the peace that comes with hearing just the birds, the locusts, the nearby stream and the wind through the trees. But I don’t get what I want.


Somehow, I smell a rat. There’s something fishy about my response. (I realize I’m mixing my smelly animal metaphors, but work with me here.) I know there are lots of other people out there who get frequently annoyed by barking dogs. I only need to mention the topic and often my listener will immediately chime in with their own stories. Sometimes it’s not the neighborhood dogs but the neighborhood dog that drives them around the bend on a regular basis. So it’s easy to get agreement that barking dogs are a bane. But still I think my response is curious.


I have my own barking dogs – not in my yard, but in my mind. I have thoughts, feelings, memories that may not literally bark, but raise their own kind of ruckus. They are upset, complaining, whining – ok, barking. They will not be comforted. And, finally, I run completely out of patience with them. I don’t any more want to comfort them – I want to shoot them. I want to kill then dead.


I honestly think that these external barking dogs somehow remind me of those places in me that just will not settle down. That, maybe like the way that one barking dog sets off this call-and-response all over my hillside, maybe this angry, mournful sound also stirs up the banshee parts of my unconscious.


So what, then, can I do about all this – about the barking dogs out there and in here? I have no illusions that there is a solution. Barking dogs have been with us maybe as long as there have been us –and there is perhaps something essentially disturbing about them. Maybe they are meant to disturb us.


But I have a strategy I am trying for my own personal over-reactions. This strategy will not “work” in the sense of handling all this. But I think it can progressively work on me in some good ways.


It is in some ways a no-brainer that the perennially in-pain parts of my history/memory/ psyche need compassion. So I can practice that. But I can go further. Pema Chodron, the American Buddhist teacher, recommends a practice called “tonglen”. I breathe in the pain I am feeling, feel it fully - then breathe out healing for it. Then I take it to a much bigger level: I breathe in the pain of all my brothers and sisters who are feeling this kind of pain, then breathe out a wish for healing not just for myself, but for all of us.


This is where those barking dogs can come in positively handy. I want them to continually remind me of the primal quality of this kind of irresolvable pain. Pain will always be with us – with us people and with the whole animal kingdom. Or, as the Buddhists say, “all sentient beings”. The Buddhists talk about offering their lives towards the healing of all sentient beings.


I don’t know about offering my life, but I might be able to offer my efforts to respond with compassion rather than anger when I hear a dog bark.

"Can't Complain"

In my various recent “front-line customer service” jobs – including a one-year stint as a cashier at a gas station – I have noticed that simply asking people how they are doing can work as an icebreaker. People don’t necessarily expect to be asked this by the gas station cashier. One woman customer said that this “keeps it human”.

And I’ve been writing a little log of all the different, creative ways that people respond. Obviously, some people give back the rote responses – “fine”, etc. While people aren’t going to really “open up” in this little mini-encounter, I have come to very much enjoy some of the variety in what I do hear back. One of my favorites is a 20ish young woman who usually says, “OK, pretty good, hangin’ in there like a champ.” I think this one says volumes. I’ve been using it occasionally myself.

I’ve become intrigued by one that I hear not just from customers, but also from people in all kinds of social situations: “Can’t complain.” Now what does that actually mean?
· “I don’t know how to”?
· “I’m not allowed to”?
· “I can’t (or won’t) let myself”?
· “I will somehow be punished if I do”?

People often follow this up with,
· “It wouldn’t do me any good” or
· “Nobody would listen.”

Are these the real issues? What if they believed it might do me some good, or that somebody might listen? Sometimes I kind of mess with people when they say these:
· “For me, sometimes it just feels good to complain.”
· “Sometimes I like to complain.”
· “Sometimes I feel better after.”
· Or “I’d listen.” Ok, sometimes I keep this one light by following it with something like, “There’s an extra charge…” But I think the point still has been made that someone might actually listen.

I wonder how these folks who say they can’t complain feel when someone else complains. I imagine that they resent someone else giving him or herself more freedom than they are willing to claim for themselves. Maybe they (internally, at least), accuse these people of being “whiners”. It seems that our society is having a real field day on “whiners” or “whining”. This cultural assault makes it harder, I think, to risk saying anything negative about your internal state. Maybe “I can’t complain” may really mean, “I can’t take the risk of being called (or thought of as) a whiner.”

When we do actually feel like complaining, but resist it, it just sets up a dynamic of tension in which we are fighting ourselves, not letting ourselves do what we really want to do.

What if more of us were to genuinely welcome complaints from others? There are some things we would have to do, in order for this to really work:
· We would have to not personally take on the upset that this person is expressing. I like the image of an aikido move, where we slide in next to the person, out of the way of their energy – and join them in looking out at that about which they are complaining. In that way, we avoid having any of their sadness/anger/resentment/ loss land in our own system.
· We would need to see the other person as bigger than their distress – that their distress is not actually who they are, but just something they are experiencing.
· We would need to see them as trying to release this stuff, to get loose of it, to return to their true form.
· We would need to do unto ourselves as we are trying to do for others – to really get it that sometimes complaining is good for us and to start doing it sometimes ourselves.

There are also some things we can do, when we are actually letting ourselves complain, to increase the chance that taking this risk will work out well:

· We can attempt to keep our focus out there – where this upset came from, where we are trying to go. We are not being hurt in this moment, but rather trying to get over some stuff that happened before – or is happening in some other part of our life.
· We can remember that we are complaining about this stuff to release it, not to rehearse it or to make our case that we are being treated badly.
· We can make a contract for a little moment to complain, rather than just spewing. “Hey, do you have a second for me to actually say how I really am feeling?” This will usually take people off guard, but they will hear that you are respecting their time and are just asking for a moment. It works well if we apply this principle when others want to complain to us. “I’d be glad to listen for a minute or so, then I need to get going.” Or, “This isn’t actually a good time – can I call you back in an hour?” (“Catch you after the meeting”, etc.)

Here’s how that kind of “contracting” might sound:
“I’m mostly pretty good, but you know, there actually is something I really would like to complain about (get off my chest, etc.). Would you be willing to listen to me for a couple of minutes? If this is an ok time for you, all I really need is for you to listen and I think I’ll feel better.”

Or, “I’m actually not feeling very good at all. It’s not anything I want to get into right now, but thanks for asking.” (Even if we are not really sure of the sincerity of their question.)

Or, to someone we know pretty well and feel safe with, but have maybe never been this real,”Oh, you know, I really feel pretty terrible. Could I have a hug?”

Or even, “I think I’m right at the edge of crying. Would you be ok with that? I know I would feel better.”

Or we might say to the other person, when we can tell they actually need to get something off their chest, or maybe have asked if we would be willing to listen:
“I’d really be ok with you letting yourself complain – or vent – with me. I really care about you and would feel honored that you let me get closer to you.”

Or, “I’m pretty good at not letting this kind of stuff get personally to me – and it might help you feel better.”

Or, “Oh, man, I’m on the run right now. Could you call me after 4? Or would you like me to call you?”

If all of this sounds a little strange to you, you might want to just experiment with it. (Or might not want to.) I really mean it when I tell people I am honored then they give me a little extra look at what’s going on inside them. It sometimes shifts the relationship to a whole different level.

"Special experiences"

Now trust me, astral projection has not been a significant part of this young life of mine. I don’t aspire to it, mostly can’t even make sense of it. I tend to be fairly earthbound that way.

I had a girlfriend, Nancy, a long time ago, who claimed to have astral projected on a regular basis. This didn’t really stand out to me, because it was one of her many flights into flakedom. And for some reason, the whole picture left me finding her fascinating, even while I found some of her avocations puzzling at best.

But I have, over the years, had at least two experiences which I have never been able to explain and which I’m sure would prompt Nancy to squeal with delight, “You-u projected, nanyananyananya…”

The first of these inexplicable experiences happened at a large choral performance of Handel’s Messiah. I like this piece well enough – maybe, I don’t know, because I haven’t heard it tooo many times, especially back then. And naturally, I like the Halleluiah Chorus. And I’m sure that, on this particular occasion, having just heard that Chorus had left me very stimulated – with, perhaps, all my nerve endings more alive.

I had not heard the piece often enough to anticipate what musically came next – a very beautiful soprano solo. Well, somewhere into that solo, as I was sitting next to my friend Linda (not an astral projectionist), that soprano hit a very high note – and I shattered.

There was no question for me, in that moment, that all the atoms in my body had separated and had filled every corner of that concert hall. The experience was obviously quite new to me, and so a little scary – but more amazing and for some reason wonderful. “Liberating” doesn’t quite capture it, “spiritual” doesn’t connote the amazing energy. “Mind-blowing” is trite, but comes closer. I definitely wanted to prolong the experience as long as possible. I somehow knew that it would momentarily end (I’m sure this was a lot of why it was not just plain terrifying) and I didn’t want it to end. I tried to sit very, very still, so that my energy would not be sucked back into my body, sitting there relatively vacated. But all these shattered, exploded atoms did go back into my body, not with a sudden “whoosh”, but kind of progressively over maybe a minute.

The whole thing left me extraordinarily stimulated and feeling very alive – and just a little sad to have it end. I had no idea what had just happened. Even though this was post-Nancy, the concept of astral projection did not present itself to explain what had gone on – then or since. I definitely did not know what it was. But I liked it a lot. And I totally trusted it – I had absolutely no inclination to doubt it, to wonder if I had somehow “made it up”. And I remember it very vividly, though it was 25 years ago.

The other experience happened in roughly the same time frame. I don’t know why both such experiences happened so close together, or why nothing quite like them since. I was freshly out of a ten-year marriage and did, over all, feel scared, wide open, and facing a world of unlimited possibilities.

For my doctoral dissertation, about four years earlier, I had compared two relaxation techniques. The first, Progressive Relaxation, is a pretty standard behavioral technique, in which you tighten and then release various muscle groups. The other technique, Autogenic Training, is related in some ways to self-hypnosis and really lots more trippy than the other technique. You start by picturing and then experiencing your arms and legs getting warm – and then just get a little wilder from there.

Now, several years out from that research, I occasionally used the Progressive Relaxation Technique – and used it with groups a lot. But my personal favorite was Autogenic Training. It was no astral projection – or I probably would not have liked it. But it did seem to take me to a place which was very peaceful and in which my body seemed to have some different and pleasurable experiences.

But none of that prepared me for this experience. I was lying on my bed upstairs in the house I had continued to rent after my wife and I broke up. (I used one room for my psychotherapy practice and so could afford the rent.) I took myself deep into the “Autogenic Training state” that I had experienced many times before: arms and legs warm, forehead cool, breathing deep and relaxed, heart rate slowed down…a rarified yet familiar state. I had no idea that something really different was about to happen.

I got out of the bed, left the bedroom, went down the hall and started down the stairs – except that my body was still in the bed. The experience of going down the hall and then down the stairs was exactly as vivid as if I was physically walking there – maybe more so, since I was often preoccupied with various thoughts as I walked through the house, whereas this time these passages through the house had my entire, heightened attention. I went into the living room, looked around, saw details that I knew were there but had not paid attention to for a while – some for a long while. I observed books and magazines lying exactly where I had left them, the orange juice glass I had left on the coffee table this morning, the cockeyed picture on the wall that used to annoy me a lot but which I had not noticed for months. I went into the kitchen and the experience was likewise – I noticed details that were clearly quite recent, including dishes in the sink and crumbs on the counter, and others I had paid no recent attention, like dust on the window ledge.

The actual experience was in some ways very different from my concert hall experience. Instead of shattering to fill the entire space, a very concentrated – but not physical – part of me had taken off out of my body and gone roaming. The feeling tone of this experience was very similar to the concert hall experience – extremely surprised, a bit unnerved, but also enjoying the experience a lot. I was maybe a little scared, but not very much – and more liked it and didn’t want it to end. But – after no more than a couple of minutes, real time (it was so vivid and “memorable” that it seemed longer) – my little journey ended the way it had begun. Whatever was this part of me that had split off retraced its steps: living room, stairs, hallway, bedroom. I didn’t so much observe it come back into my body as that I suddenly knew it was there. And, like at the concert hall, I felt very, very alive, tremendously stimulated – and a bit sad to have it end.

I have had some great, memorable, wonderful – maybe even mystical - experiences since these two. I have fully surrendered to - and in some ways been transported by – experiences of music, laughter, sunsets, sex, etc. But none have had the kind of otherworldly, so-out-of-the-ordinaryness as these two.

What to call them? I don’t think that astral projection is a thing, but rather just a name people have come up with to describe some very special experiences. Were these that kind of experience? I have honestly never had the inclination to read up on or to talk with those astral projectionists. Part of me doesn’t want to put a label on these experiences – to let them stay as special as they have always seemed.

What do these two extraordinary experiences have to do with the topic of this blog – Life Lived More Deeply? It seems like I did drop down into – or get transported above, words really don’t do it here – my ordinary reality, and so discovered that there are realms of reality I didn’t know of before. I experienced that there is something in me that resides in my body, but is not limited by it. Life Lived More Deeply has a lot to do with filling in the spaces that keep us feeling separated from the rest of life. Each of these experiences had to do with moving into what I would have thought was empty space. Each of them left me very clear that my conceptual notions about myself and about the world around me are very inadequate – they by no means explain these experiences, and I have come to trust less these ideas about myself or the world. I don’t think that they do capture or point to all that is real around me. Words themselves break down and feel less reliable and less complete.

It now seems to me that Life Lived More Deeply has to include these experiences, the fairly extraordinarily high and or deep – but less trippy – experiences I have had since, and all manner of experiences that I have not yet had, but that I now believe must be out there to be had. Life Lived More Deeply means that none of my concepts can truly capture the nature of life, or of me. I truly do not know fully who I am.

Why I’m not “New Age” anymore

Once upon a time, I was enamored of everything New Age, completely fascinated by all its “alternative” therapies. I thought we were entering a Brave New World of freedom from the “old paradigms” of health and healing.

The other day, I went to an “Expo” of New Age modalities. There was booth after booth after booth, each offering its own form of healing or “personal growth”. I couldn’t get out of there soon enough – I practically ran out the door.

I’m sure that all these practitioners were very sincere. And many of them probably “help” people in some fashion.

One element that almost all these “healers” had in common was that they start with some form of diagnosis: your chakras are out of balance, your soul needs to be retrieved, you have too many minerals in your hair, you’re ignorant of your past lives, your electrons need to be tuned up, etc., etc.

Then, of course, each of these booths offered some kind of treatment that was appropriate to their particular diagnosis. You can get your charkas balanced, your meridians humming, your akashic records expunged. You can use crystals, pendula, activators, tuners and potions of every sort.

What virtually all of these modalities have in common, hype notwithstanding, is that they promote “healing from without”. Many of them would argue with this. They are promoting inner healing with these crystals, etc., they would declare. I’m unmoved by these declarations. If you need these rocks to trigger your healing, then it is not inner healing. Wearing crystals in a bag around your neck may be less invasive than drugs or surgery, but I’m sorry, there’s still some mumbo-jumbo going on here. The drugs, for all their running roughshod over our natural healing mechanisms, may still largely be operating from placebo effect – and so too, I suspect, for the negative-air-ion-charged jojoba oil. The thing all of them have in common is the message they send to our conscious and unconscious mind that 1) you need healing and 2) you can’t do it by yourself.

Oh, and one more message is imbedded in most of New Age thinking: some people are more in tune with this New Age than others. I like to think of this as the track and field model of personal growth – some souls are just more athletic than others, have more personal or spiritual prowess. It is fundamentally a competitive model. Some people are just further down the road. Maybe all of us can be placed somewhere on this continuum of realization – and these folks are farther ahead. We may call them old souls, healers, more evolved or – the real kicker – enlightened. And mostly here, “enlightened” typically does not mean that we take ourselves lightly – no, in most cases we are taking ourselves or these other “enlightened ones” kind of serious.

And what if we don’t need healing? What if the symptoms we are currently experiencing are part of our path as much as our “peak experiences”? What if the message we most need to integrate is not that the New Age cavalry are on their way, but that we are just perfect right now and that our symptoms will shift exactly when they are meant to – and that there is just nothing we can do to slow this down or speed it up. What we can do is to add on one more layer of mystification: not only do we have X wrong with us, but now we need Y to make us better.

And, worst of all, we are left comparing ourselves with others. It’s you over there and me over here. And we are not only essentially separate, but more than separate, we are competing with each other – one of us is closer to the goal line than the other.

Now, how, when these various symptoms genuinely make us feel like crap, can I possibly say that they are just right? Because most of them emanate from already believing that there is something wrong with us or with our life or with life period. The real source of our suffering is dualism – the belief that there are good feelings or bad ones (symptoms), that we are better sometimes than others, that some people are more healthy or enlightened than others. Our current symptoms are just right because they are the game – they are what keeps us busy here, what we get to, little by little, see through.

If there is actually something like enlightenment, I bet it has to do with seeing through all this mystification. The more enlightened we become, the more we genuinely take our “self” lightly. We may celebrate the idea that each of us has our own unique path up the mountain. But, if each is unique, then comparing those paths becomes utter nonsense. There is no valid way to say that one soul is “further up”. In fact, there is no meaning to saying that you or I are “further up” than we were before.

Our whole path is but one unbroken thread. To value one part of the thread more than another puts the whole business in a knot. If I am to fully value or accept myself at this particular point in my story, I’ve got to love the whole story, because that’s what got me here. So a “realized” being, if there is such a thing, has simply realized that – for all our separate fingerprints – we are all equally valid, equally whole, and, in fact, inextricably woven into each other. Thinking of me as self and you as other is just the big comical game of this life. When we really see through this separation mystification, we almost always wink, smile, chuckle, belly laugh or absolutely roll on the floor with hilarity. What an amazing relief! What a big, sly, tricky joke this whole drama has been. What’s not to laugh?

If to become enlightened means to get over the notion that I am separate from you, then there is no me left to be enlightened. Enlightenment is just one wonderful wave of relief sweeping through all of creation, a rising tide that truly does lift all boats and is happening to tickle my little dock of the bay – giving me a momentary or longer glimpse that your boat and mine are made of the same fundamental stuff, that life has just cast us in different molds to make it more fun and interesting to get it that the stuff under our surfaces is both the same and totally connected.

Letting life surprise us

On this last New Year’s Day, a young woman who lives in my house said that her wish for the New Year was “Infinite bliss, right now”. I didn’t want to rain on her parade, but I think that the closest I could get to a neutral response was “Good luck”.

When she asked my wish for the New Year, I said that I want life to surprise me. And that is mostly the truth.

Oh, sure, I do have some addictive longings: I’d like more money and less stress. I’d like regular, more lucrative employment and more fun. I’d like to get to the mountains more. I’d like a girlfriend or at least to get laid. The list goes on. I suppose there is a part of me that also wants “Infinite bliss, right now.” I don’t hear it, but it’s likely to be there somewhere.

But I am less and less taking these kinds of wishes seriously. It’s clearer to me all the time that life is way smarter than I am. I would be a poor choreographer for my life – or stage director, traffic cop, etc. What life hands me is often not what I would have chosen. Sometimes I don’t recognize right away why this particular happening is the best thing for me – often I will never know.

Carlos Lopez, a student of Ramana Maharshi, likes to say that the clearer we get, the less we try to control our lives – which we will never manage to do, anyway – the more life tends to surprise us. And this is truly the best and highest aspiration - to be curious, open, observant, and to let life take us where it will. This is what it is going to do, whether or not we cooperate, and it’s lots more fun to cooperate.

Looking Meditation

Our sense of vision, which is the lead sense for most of us, is kind of addictively tied to seeing separation: it breaks the panorama of stuff around us into distinct “things”. This activity relies on depth perception and takes some fairly sophisticated sensory and neural gymnastics to make all this separating work. (Our auditory and tactile senses are much more likely to perceive global waves of stimuli.)

But there are ways to get around this misperception of what is actually all connected. One is to briefly unplug our depth perception. You can look at what is around you as if it were a photograph or painting – flat, with everything connected on that two-dimensional surface. It’s a little tricky to do this and will usually only work for moments, but is a fun experiment.

The other work-around of this erroneous perceiving is more cognitive and is a perceptive skill that we actually can grow. In order to see everything around us as separate, self-contained objects – which is how we have learned to perceive things - we have needed to do two things:

1) We need to believe that this object we are looking at stays in one place and does not intermingle with the objects around it. That vase is separate from the table it is sitting on. But modern physics tells us that, on a subatomic level, each object has only a tendency to exist where we see it. In fact, most of that object is actually space, with its electrons moving around so fast that it looks solid. Secondly, these electrons don’t stay put within the edges we see around the object. The electrons of the vase actually do tend to intermingle with the electrons of the table. So what looks solid is mostly space and what looks like a clear separation is actually not. Things are neither as solid nor as separate as our visual sense would tell us. Remembering these two things – even momentarily, because the old habits of our visual sense will tend to reassert themselves – can help us take more lightly the separations that we think we see.

2) The other deceptive cognitive spin we tend to put on our visual sense is that we decode the space between things as being empty – that’s what allows things to stand alone, separate. But that empty space is anything but. In scientific terms, it’s loaded with particles. In energetic terms, it’s loaded with life energy, prana – aliveness. So then how does anything stay separate? If everything we see has in common this subatomic chaos, is actually made up of the same energetic structure, where each electron flashes back and forth between matter and energy – and this is equally true for what looks like empty space as it is true for what looks like solid objects – then what happens to what looks like solid boundaries?

Again, this shift in our perception relies on a cognitive process – our visual sense does not yet know how to perceive energy filing the space around us or the space that these super-fast electrons are always leaving all through that vase. I think that some mystics are able to literally see all these interconnections and mushy boundaries. And sometimes one can see it during or after deep meditation. LSD pretty surely induces this kind of perception, at least some of the time – no wonder that so many “seekers” have been attached to dropping acid, especially in the 70’s. Many martial arts, perhaps Tai Chi especially, rely on working with and moving around the chi or Qi – the life energy – around us. When you are doing a good Tai Chi push, you can feel or even see the energetic force that you are pushing in front of you.

If you have ever done the exercise where you rub your hands together fast, then hold them out just inches apart until you start to feel the ball of energy between them, you have had a glimpse of this. The more you play with this exercise, you can feel the ball of energy between your hands even as you move them further apart. During a ten-day silent meditation, I became able – with my hands out to my sides, my body and mind relaxed, and moving very slowly – to feel the energy boundary of a tree, which extends out way beyond what looks like a solid physical boundary. I even tried to teach my young nieces how to do this, which they found totally hysterical. (“Uncle John has always been a little odd – in a nice way – but this is the farthest out he’s ever been.”)

But, even without LSD or advanced martial arts or meditation-induced mystical perception, knowing that all this is true can actually shift the way we look at things. Especially in repose, we can look at the world in front of us as if it were all connected. Allowing our breathing to get deep and full, our body relaxed, and maybe our eyes soft and half-closed – all of this can help. And perhaps all of these ways of starting to see connectedness where we had before seen separation, perhaps all of them rely on not trying – letting our eyes and maybe even our minds get soft, receptive. The more receptive we get, the more we are available to life giving us glimpses of this connected reality – even when we are not looking for it.

But I was so sure…

This morning I drove myself absolutely crazy looking for the little spiral notebook in which I keep some of my daily to-do’s (those I need for quick visual access) and other notes I make during the day. I tend to get pretty behind on transcribing those notes, which makes the pad more valuable for me, so I don’t lose all those bits of information.

I had a very clear memory, this morning, of putting that little notebook (3 inches by 5 inches) into my left front pocket (where I like to carry it), as I prepared to leave work last night (in the gift shop of the big downtown hotel). I kind of remembered, this morning, stopping somewhere along my 10 minute walk home, to make some kind of note about something that crossed my mind as I was walking. My little spiral notekeeper could possibly have fallen out of my pocket then – but that was not feasible, because I absolutely remembered putting at the end of my bed when I got home last night. That’s where I like to put it, in case I want to add a note to it or record a note from it – typically into my computer database.

I had a very clear image of tossing it on that end of the bed last night. I could not, however, remember putting it either on my dresser or the on the filing cabinet, the two places I tend to put it when I’m going to bed. So it might have gotten caught up in my blanket or bedspread – or fallen under or behind the bed.

I checked all those places thoroughly – three times. I checked the dresser probably four times – likewise the top of the filing cabinet. Both of these surfaces had lots of other clutter, but not really enough to conceal the notebook – especially the third or fourth time I moved everything around. Then I looked in places where it should not have been, where I never put it – some of those twice. I checked the wastebasket – sometimes I have found missing objects there.

The more I looked, the more frustrated and angry I got. I hate it when I lose these notebooks, and this would not be the first one I had lost – probably the third in the last year. And each time pisses me off no end. Why do even bother taking all these little notes – books or movies I want to remember, addresses, phone numbers, future to-do’s, etc. – if I’m going to just lose them?

I told myself a couple of times to just let go of it and to trust that it would eventually turn up. I knew that was good advice, but I couldn’t take it. I grew more and more intense and my language more and more obscene.

A couple of times I thought to call work, but that made really no sense, as I knew I had had it at home last night. I was working again tonight and could look for it then, but was sure that I would not find it there. Finally, when I could not shake my frustration and upset, I kind of gave up and called the gift shop. I knew that would not help, but I could no longer think of anyplace else to look – and still could not take my advice of letting it go.

Andrew, my boss, was working the a.m. shift. He said, brightly, “Yes, sir, I’ve got it right here. I put it in the drawer with the work shift calendar.”

But how? How could it possibly be there when I had such clear memories of putting it into my pocket before leaving and then of taking it out of my pocket at home? This made no sense.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, likes to ask people (sometimes in very large groups, at one of his public talks), “Are you sure?” After time for people to think about this question, he likes, then, to ask, “Which way is up?” He then will point towards the sky and say, “Probably most of you said this way. But are you sure?” (Long, dramatic pause…) “Our friends in China would not agree with you.”

Oops. When we say, “He doesn’t know which end is up”, this is such a classic put-down. And here it is true of most all of us in this crowd of hundreds – or thousands.

Well, if I don’t know which way is up, then just what am I sure of? I could say that this is a rock I am holding, and be pretty confident of that one. But I will probably also assume that what I am holding is “solid as a rock”. But atomic physicists tell us that this rock is mostly space – with its electrons moving around so fast that it seems solid. Hmmm.

I was sooo sure about that notebook this morning, but I was wrong. How many other times that I think I am sure, is this also the case?

But, aside from maybe being wrong a lot of the time, what’s so wrong about feeling sure about things? Going around questioning everything does not seem such a useful state.

When I tell myself that I know something for sure, I tighten. I build a rigid wall around that piece of knowing, which resists any information to the contrary. So I may become more and more out of touch with reality. I am responding to my own internal belief, rather than the concrete details of what is actually in front of me in the here and now.

When I was looking for my notebook, the evidence of my senses said that it was not in my room. But I would not believe this – I couldn’t believe it. Why was I so sure of things – putting it in my pocket at work, taking it out of my pocket at home – which had not happened?

Us humans like structure. We live actually in a world where there is so much we don’t know – what that person in front of us is thinking or is about to do, what is around that next corner, what’s going to happen tomorrow. Buddhists like to remind us that we don’t know even if we are going to make it to tomorrow. “The only thing we know for sure is that we are going to die – and we don’t know when. How then shall we live?”

Oh, man, we don’t like that one. If there is one thing we want to be ble to count on, it is that we have at least a little more time. If we didn’t know that, then what would we do? Quit our jobs? Spend our money? Have an affair? Have it out with a friend? It looks like chaos, just ready to break out. I want to know that I have tomorrow, that I will go to work tomorrow, that my partner will come home tomorrow, etc., etc., etc.

The truth, though, is that each of these items is unpredictable. When I make myself sure of them, I build a brick wall where right now there is open space.

What actually could happen, were I to release my clinging to these things, is that I could experience life as flow, not solidity. I could experience myself as fluid, rather than rigid. I could stay open and receptive to how this person in front of me is going to turn up – or how I am going to turn up. I might learn to relax more and to trust the process of my life, rather than trusting in things. Another Thich Nhat Hanh quote: “Science is now showing that the whole of the cosmos is reflected in this speck of dust – and we think we know the person in the passenger seat of our car.”

In some ways, this kind of humility about the life around us might seem more challenging. But, actually, building up and holding on to these rigid structures is very hard work – it uses up most of our energy. To stay open, maybe confused sometimes, available to surprise, is actually lots less work – and way more fun.

Second-guessing

To second-guess ourselves – to criticize what we have done, to wish we had done differently, etc. - is so human, so natural, and so not helpful. But, since we are not likely to completely stop second-guessing ourselves in this lifetime (ok, some of may become fully enlightened in this lifetime, but just in case not), the thing to do is to not second-guess (criticize) ourselves over just having indulged in some second-guessing.

If we don’t succeed there, it’s just turtles from there on down. We really just tumble down through infinite levels of second-guessing – almost simultaneous and mostly unconscious. At some point, grace may reach out to us and we finally accept the whole parade of second-guesses – all of it. We then can see how human all of it is, breathe a big sigh of relief and be full of empathy for how hard it is being a human being (not knowing who we really are).

A Good Story

“You can play the game, you can act your part – I know it isn’t easy to do.” James Taylor

“Who is playing out this drama? Who decides if it is a comedy or a tragedy?” Carlos Lopez

“It’s not just something I made up – It’s something I know. It’s something I read.” (Overheard in passing, as I was thinking about this piece)

My mom, when she heard somebody acknowledge that they weren’t really sure that they were remembering something accurately, liked to say, “Well, it makes a good story, anyway.” And it was clear that she considered a “good story” to be every bit as important as the literal truth – maybe even more so. (This may have partially been the Irish in her.)

What makes a good story? Is it drama? A happy ending? Good laughs?

What is the punch line of the story, the final act, the curtain coming down?

It’s clear that there are stories within stories – including shorter, self-contained segments within our life stories. Some stories chronicle many generations – and show the linkages among several successive life stories. Or a really good storyteller (novelist, film-maker, even sometimes a historian or biographer) can weave together many stories simultaneously – even those that are geographically, demographically and/or socioeconomically very separate.

So who decides what chunk of a person’s life makes up a separate story? Who sees the linkages among two or more life stories? Whether the decider or seer is a protagonist in the story or an outside storyteller, it’s clear that there is lots of room for subjectivity in creating most any story.

So it’s subjective – so what? What’s the difference? Maybe lots.

If I tell myself a story in which I am a victim, I may succumb to helplessness – or fight back. These situations can lead to paranoia – and/or domestic tragedies. (A few days ago in our area, a jealous husband killed the 18-year-old student with whom his 30-year-old wife/teacher was sleeping. This husband, as contrasted to the ever more common legal action against teachers, picked the kid as the villain in this story.)

So who/what/how determines a “true story”?

• The guy I quoted at the beginning of this piece believes that the story must be true because he read it somewhere. Others might put faith in what they hear on the TV or radio news.
  
• Most of us tend to pick and choose our sources – some will give more credence to the New York Times, others to Fox TV.
  
• Most of us tend to believe the stories we tell ourselves.

I really like a bumper sticker I’ve been seeing around town that says, “You don’t have to believe everything you think.” For me this gets to the heart of the story I am creating now as I write this. In the story I’m telling myself, right here and now (though I have thought these same thoughts many times in the past), there is tremendous subjectivity in the stories we tell, see, believe – even in the ones we tell about ourselves about our own lives. Maybe these especially.

So what? What if we concede this subjectivity in our own stories about ourselves? And not everybody will concede this about his or her own story. This area, the stories we tell ourselves – and sometimes others – about our own lives, are often the stories we will most resolutely defend.

In another post, I quote Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen master, as encouraging people to ask themselves, “Am I sure?” That previous post refers to which perceptions are accurate in the here and now. But the same principle can be applied to our stories. Am I sure about the veracity of this story?

As I described in that piece about here-and-now accuracy, holding on to certainty about our stories tends to create tension and rigidity. We fight to defend our version of the story. This can lead to shooting 18 year old kids, or even to full-scale wars.

But what is the advantage of staying looser with our stories?

• We make ourselves less defensive, less tense – more open.
  
• We need less distance from others. We don’t compete for whose story is more accurate, but see a bigger story that contains all these sub-stories. It then becomes not my story vs. your story, but “our story”, which contains all our various versions of the truth.
  
• If we accept that we are always, at every moment, making up stories – which may hold some specific accuracies, but never manage to include all important elements of the truth, including the stories of the other characters in our story – this gives us a lot of room to get more creative with the stories we tell.

A story that I am telling myself these days is that any time I make myself the hero of my story (or any of my sub-stories) – or even make myself causal, even the protagonist – I am missing the boat. If I were to trace the antecedents of this story fully enough, I would find that my current behavior has been shaped by so many previous scenarios, so many other people, that it is in no way separate at all – I am in no way separate at all.

Some would say that this perspective is limiting, that it keeps us from being proactive, from acting heroically. I would say that when we are telling ourselves a story in which we are the hero, it is just as subjective as when we tell a story where we are the victim.

It seems to me that the only even-close-to-accurate story is the story of the human race, imbedded in the much bigger story of the planet earth, within the even bigger story of the universe. I tend to call this big, big story, “life”. We sit within a bigger context – life. We are not truly causal, but life is. Or maybe (and I am definitely leaning more and more this way), causal stories are just one genre of story. Maybe the whole notion of one thing causing another is simply one way of looking at things.

Yeah, the story I’m most liking these days is one where nothing is separate from anything else, which leaves no “things” - and no “thing” to cause any other thing. Some quantum physicists these days are telling similar stories, but they may be equally locked into the particular lens they are looking through. I am seeing quantum physics and mechanistic physics as not in competition with each other, but as part of a still larger story – in which neither camp is “right” or “wrong”.

Because “right and wrong” is just one more kind of story.

Why?

“Why” is a lie. “Why” lives in the world of mechanics, of cause and effect, of billiard balls bouncing endlessly off each other. The true nature of reality is much more quantum than that - more holistic, more interconnected, more holographic.

Every bit of our behavior is an outgrowth of everything that has gone before. It is our path – every bit of it. Ours uniquely, as no other. And it all hangs together – it fits together as our own little jigsaw puzzle, or a rare vase that has fallen and shattered, and which we spend our lives piecing back together.

Courses on “Interviewing Skills” teach people to not use the “Why?” question, because it makes people defensive. These courses might say that people get defensive because this question pries into their motivations, their inner states. That’s all true, but there’s more: the question “Why?” has no valid answer. We might not be able to verbalize this truth, but some part of us knows it.

When we try to answer the “Why?” question, we just go back and make up a story. The story might be interesting – it might even disclose some meaningful information about us. But it doesn’t answer the question.

We might get into ballpark answers if we said things like:

- Because I’m me, having had all the experiences I have had in this life.

- Because, in that particular moment in time, that was all I could possibly have done.

- I have no real answer for why I did it. I can glimpse pieces of what was going on in me just before I did it, but I don’t know how those pieces got there. It’s all way too big, too complex for me. And it will make me crazy trying to figure it out. So I’ll let it go. It was what it was, this moment is as it is – and the next moment will be exactly what it will be. And it will surprise me.

Waiting for a “Yes”

Aliyah, one of my favorite Jubilee poets, performed a piece this morning (jamming with this two-time Grammy winner on acoustic base – very exciting) with no title (Aliyah doesn’t do titles), but loosely about her recently-developed process of waiting to act until she gets a clear Yes about a particular course of action. Obviously, she is not totally consistent about this. I bet she doesn’t apply it to brushing her teeth, crossing the street – or even many activities where it might actually be more appropriate or useful. But I liked the idea of it. It’s actually not a new idea – my friend Monty has spoken and written eloquently and persuasively about the ways he applies this principle. But it was good to be reminded of it.

Sitting outside in the sun just now, smoking a cigarette, across the street from a coffee shop where some friends were gathered – a couple of them expecting me – I just could find no “Yes” in me about going into the coffee shop. So I sat there in the sun, at first judging myself for this lack of action. I actually was feeling somewhat shy and awkward this morning, so I started (so drably predictable) by criticizing myself. But the self-criticism dropped away with relative ease, as I let myself rather just pay attention to the uncomfortable feelings. Then I got a very distinct “Yes” about capturing this moment in writing. I spent about 15 minutes getting this down on paper, really kinda having fun, considering the squeamishness of the topic.

Then I got a “Yes” for going into the coffee shop – not a totally enthusiastic Yes, but a Yes nonetheless. I was moving slow. I got my coffee, then didn’t sit down right away. There were about eight folks, all of whom I knew, around a fairly big circle – and I didn’t sit down right away. I didn’t know really where I wanted to sit – what spot called to me – and I waited, again, for a Yes. I finally got one and sat down between Jeff and Richard.

Then I had some great little eye contact and non-verbal greetings with Robin, with whom I feel lots more connection (based on actually very few words ever exchanged, much more on eye contact, smiles, and occasional hugs). And it was totally spontaneous and enthusiastic for me to go around the table and sit just behind her (no room around this side of the table).

Then a few minutes later, Robin left, leaving me maybe ten feet outside the circle – with now a clear open spot, Robin’s spot. I checked inside myself about moving up. I wasn’t really asking myself, “Do I want to move up?” I was much more scanning my insides for some attraction, some leaning towards moving up. I could find none, so I sat where I was. Not particularly gregarious, that – but I still was not feeling gregarious. Not really so shy and awkward, after my writing outside (ah, the miracle of surrendering to the muse), but also not gregarious.

I also recognized that I was not the least bit interested in the conversation and was more enjoying simply listening to all the interesting sounds in the café. Then I got the impulse to write something down – about this very process of waiting for a Yes. I had a really nice little notebook, which I had just used outside, in my backpack on the other side of the table. Shall I go get it? Nothing in myself that I could identify wanted to get up and go over there. I did want the notebook – if I could have somehow teleported it from my pack to my hands, I would have done so. But I didn’t want it enough to go around the table for it. And, choosing to not get it, I breathed a little sigh of relief. Some part of my mind and/or body was grateful that I had simply stood my ground (or sat it, I guess). Then I pulled out a business card and filled the entire back side (and all the white space on the front) with a fun little note about Yes’s. Not a napkin (of which there were none on the table), but just about as cool.

Am I going to spend the rest of my life waiting for Yes’s before I act? Hardly. The whole notion mostly went out of my head in the two hours since then, emerging just a few minutes ago. Sometimes my Yes will not come from that actual word, but from observing what my body is pulled towards or literally from watching where my feet lead me. Sometimes I will learn as much from good, clear No’s. No’s seem (and I guess are) more negative than Yes’s, but I think just as important. Our Yes’s get their power and integrity from the clarity of our No’s.

Do I have more to write about this topic right now? I’m not getting a “Yes”. Do I want to stop now? A clear “Yes”. Bye.

Non-resistance

This morning I was waiting in line outside a government office that opens at 9 a.m. The handful of other people who were also standing there at 8:30 a.m. probably knew, as did I, that this was the way to get at the head of the line, which can grow exponentially by 9 o’clock.

The 50ish guy in front of me seemed harmless. In his good old boy southern accent, he turned to me and the folks behind me and commented on how a few more warm days like this one in early March and the still-brown grass would “come on like crazy”. Talking about the oncoming spring felt very comfortable to me.

Then, from some connection known only to the speaker, he shifted to how much colder the winters used to be, how he had to walk through the snow to get to school because “they didn’t cancel school like they do today”. Pretty classic – almost archetypal – stuff about “When I was a kid” (“When I was your age”, etc.). I started then to only half-listen, because these stories can get a bit tedious.

Then another shift in the trajectory of this guy’s (so far unencouraged) soliloquy, which I had not predicted: “They used to give us whippin’s, too. If you got out of line, that paddle came out. Nowadays, if you even look at ‘em wrong, they sue you…. And then they wonder why kids come into school shooting people.” I felt the tension start to build in my body.

“They believed in the Ten Commandments back then. Now they’re getting rid of those, too.”

“Now that’s the real problem.” This last had obviously hit a nerve for the 70ish lady behind me. Now I was no longer just face-to-face with this guy who held beliefs very different from my own – and who, as he warmed to the task, was expressing them with a growing level of belligerency. Now I was trapped in the middle of some reactionary call-and-response, with no place to go unless I wanted to give up my place in the line.

Before things “got all pear-shaped” (I loved that expression from a Brit colleague I had worked with a few years before, to describe a situation that had suddenly become problematic), I had been feeling kind of nice and relaxed, if maybe not fully awake yet - no time for coffee before heading to this office.

I had even, as I stood in line, been practicing the “body awareness” exercise I describe in another post. Noticing my breathing and the various sensations in my body, I had even been a little bit peaceful.

But not now. The hairs were standing up on the back of my neck. I had an impulse to say something, to not let all this oppressive (by my standards) shit just sit. “Speak up for yourself.” I was right in the middle – in the middle – of the kind of attitudes that I hate about living in the South.

Then I heard a little whisper from somewhere in me, just ever-so-lightly inserting itself whenever my angry protestations took a moment to breathe:

“What if you didn’t resist this?”

I knew immediately to what this inner voice was referring. It was reminding me of a principle in which I deeply believe and occasionally even practice – if not at all in this particular moment.

What if I were to remember – and even feel in my body – that nothing was going wrong here? What if I did not shift from peace to alarm bells, based simply on some stuff people said – which was not in any way aimed at me, but I just happened to be standing in the middle of? Sure, getting accidentally in the middle of a drive-by shooting would be very bad – but these were words, for Pete’s sake. Maybe kind of angry, negative words. Maybe words with which I strongly disagree, but still just words.

I started in that last sentence to say, “with which I violently disagree”. Ah, here is a lead for me; here is something I can work with. The problem here was really not in any of the words I was hearing, but rather some violence within me – the part of me that feels it needs to “fight back”.

What if I did not need to fight back?

What if I reassured myself that, in the here and now, no one was in any danger? There weren’t any kids about to be paddled, etc.

There was no way for me to change anybody’s mind – and really no need to. In this moment, it really did not make any difference what these people thought and believed.


There are so many stimuli around me that I have the impulse to resist. A little later in the morning, I saw a guy walk by who was way overweight. Something in me tensed up from just watching him. I didn’t want to be seeing this. But why? I’m not him, carrying around all that extra weight. I have no idea what it is like for him to be so heavy – for all I know, it does not bother him at all. But it bothered me.

How many other things do I see, hear, read, etc., in the course of a day that lead me to tighten inside? I started in that sentence to say, “make me tighten”. But these stimuli obviously don’t make me tighten – they don’t make me do anything. It’s me that does it.

I think it’s safe to say that at least some of my tightness is an expression of disapproval. I don’t approve of what these people say, of how heavy that guy is, etc. But whether I approve or not is certainly not going to make any difference in what I see, now is it? My approval or lack of it has no impact on anything in the outside world, unless I feel compelled to mess with it – which will almost certainly just create more mess. No, my disapproval affects nothing out there – only in here. I get tense when I disapprove of some part of my world. I may get irritated, self-righteous, angry, defensive – all manner of lesser or greater discomfort. I make myself unhappy.

It obviously doesn’t have to go that way. It would be totally possible to remind myself of something else I deeply believe, no matter how often I forget it: nothing is going wrong. It is all as it is meant to be. There is a wisdom operating here that’s a lot smarter than my little mind. I don’t have to be the traffic cop or babysitter for how other people, think, feel, or speak. I don’t need in any way to get in the middle of how much or badly they eat, whether they work out, etc., etc., etc.

No, if I let go of patrolling the rest of the world, but just walk my own beat, that’s really plenty to keep my hands full. And, when I’m lucky, I will apply some of these same insights to what I see, hear, feel inside of me. I don’t have to disapprove of any of it, try to change it – I don’t have to go on alarm at all. Trying to mess with what I find in myself will most likely be as little effective as if I had waded into the reactionary deep water on line in front of that office this morning.

I’ve really got better things to do, like noticing my breathing.

What am I going to do next?

Life is more and more having its way with me.

I’m sitting at the 11:15 Jubilee Sunday service (roughly 300 folks at each of the two services), wondering what I’m going to do when it’s over. Across the big room, I see a couple of guys with whom I sometimes go for coffee. Will I again go out with them? I don’t know – part of me wants to and part not. Why not? I’m not sure, it’s just so.

But more true still is that I really have no idea what I’m going to do next. I can make myself anxious by trying, now, to figure it out. I can make myself tense and tight by, in this moment, deciding a path and determining to make it happen. In this way, I can cut myself off from whatever feelings, impulses and aversions might bubble up in me between now and the end of the service. Making decisions is way over-rated.

It feels soothing, in this moment, to remind myself that I don’t know, in this moment, which path will nurture my spirit more. More even than that, I really, really don’t know what I will do. To tell myself that I do know is just a useless conceit.

How will I know? I will really know only when that after-service moment arrives. I will know only when I see – just see – where, in that moment, my feet take me.

A few weeks ago, a good friend came up to me during the noisy exchange-the-peace part of the service and asked me what I was doing afterwards. It was really kind of thrilling to announce out loud – and to have it witnessed by a close friend – that I just didn’t know. I literally told her that I wouldn’t know until I see where my feet take me. Geez, it was fun to say that!

She seemed a little surprised. I imagine she was in that little bubble of thinking that we choose these things. I was in a different bubble – or maybe out of the bubble – where choice is not as important as consciously surrendering to life, and knowing that it will have its way with me whether I like it or not.

Two hands

Two hands

I’ve been breaking things lately. Breaking and dropping things. Breaking and dropping and spilling things. And, for every actual breakage/droppage/spillage, I have had two or three or four close calls.

How I have been making this mess, more specifically, is that I have been setting cups, glasses and other containers too close to the edge of the surface where I am putting them. Actually too much hanging over the edge. And there have been lots more instances, when I go to retrieve an item, where I discover that it, also, is hanging precariously over the edge.

Now, why/how do I do this? Am I a daredevil who likes to beat the odds or trod just as close to a potential accident as possible? Are these surfaces so crapped out that there is no room for these additional objects? (There actually is some truth in this one, but I don’t think it is the primary factor here.)

No, there is another factor that runs through most of these little mishaps (not all of them little, as when, the other day, I dropped my favorite ceramic coffee mug into the porcelain sink). In each case, I was trying to do two things at once. Or actually I stopped paying attention to the first task (placing the container on a surface) before it was completed, in order to move on to another. Literally, in each of the instances that I have recently tracked, I had shifted my head and body orientation in a different direction before the item had settled onto its new resting place. I had not stuck around to actually see the container get successfully placed where I had aimed it. Rather, some part of me had put that task on automatic pilot, trusting that it could finish getting done without any focused attention on my part. And, clearly, in each of these cases, my unconscious strategy proved wrong.

Some mindfulness teachers (Zen Buddhists, etc.) suggest that you use two hands for tasks like these – even if, literally, only one hand is required. This physically prevents you from beginning another task before this one is done. Or any physical task, at any rate – you could still be, in your mind, writing a letter or planning your day. Using two hands, especially as you grow familiar, could still allow for you to do two things at once. But it’s not as easy.

The mindfulness teachers regard this two-hands exercise as a little meditation – a reminder and practice of being fully present to each moment of our lives.

I haven’t even gotten around to trying this little exercise yet, even though I have given myself that assignment after my last few drops. I am quite the creature of habit, and very inclined to be in my head, regardless of what other tasks I may be doing. So I have both not stopped shifting on to the next task before finishing the first, but I have not yet remembered to try the two-hands practice – even having put a little note on my dresser, reminding me to do so.

I think I’ll go over there and post a bigger note. And I’m hoping that writing this piece here will help get my attention. Or maybe I’ll get up from this computer and right now go practice carrying things with two hands. I like that idea. I’m going to go do it for a couple of minutes now, and maybe give myself a little reminder to try it for a couple of minutes every day, until it becomes a new habit.

I do realize there is a risk of the two hands becoming a new habit – and that I will be writing or planning or whatever as I do it. But I’m already thinking of ways to make that practice even stronger – by paying close attention to the feel and heft of the object I’m carrying, looking at it fully, hearing the sound of it landing on the new surface, feeling all the little physical sensations from lifting, moving, turning, etc.

I’m getting excited – this could all be a lot of fun.

The right place at the right time

A few years ago, I was having one of those days where I just knew that I was running late.

I had no actual appointments that day – nor any pressing deadlines. So, literally, there was no way that I could be late. But I knew, somehow, that I was behind where I should be.

I used to have lots of those days back then – unstructured days with unrealistically long to-do lists. Everything, maybe especially errands but really everything, took longer than I had allotted for it. As I went from one errand to the next, the tension would just ramp up in me as I pushed a little harder, with each failure, to keep up with my internal schedule.

On this particular day, I was especially behind the eight ball – particularly disappointed in my performance with the tasks I did at home, and then even more as I “ran” (now there’s an interesting word) my errands.

I finally kind of gave up. I didn’t “surrender to the flow” of my day. I didn’t forgive myself for being so ineffective. No, I just gave up – and entered a familiar state of feeling inept, scattered, maybe just one step this side of absolute loser.

Then something pretty amazing happened. I was walking down the street in Evanston, a north side suburb all the way across Chicago from Oak Park, the west side suburb where I lived, performing one last errand for the day – maybe number 7 out of 11 on my list. Since I had given up on success and resigned myself that this was the last thing I was going to accomplish this afternoon, I was walking a lot slower. I actually was more present to that particular moment than I had been all day.

As I was walking south down the street, coming up to a corner, I looked across the street and saw a young guy riding his bicycle north through the intersection. And, coming from the east, a car that had just barely slowed at his stop sign as the driver prepared to come through the intersection – directly into the path of the bicycle, which he obviously did not see.

They were about ten feet from each other when I involuntarily screamed – really loud. Each of them looked up from whatever daydream in which they were immersed – and the car slammed to a halt, maybe three feet from the bike. The cyclist continued through the intersection. The driver hesitated until the bike had cleared his path, then also resumed his trip.

I was almost immediately very relieved from the absolute fright I had just felt. As I resumed walking down the street, one thought grabbed totally hold of my mind: I had been in exactly the right place at the right time. Had I not been there to scream, there seemed no question that the car would have hit the bike rider – possibly rode over him.

This realization threw all my certainty of my behindness into a cocked hat. Had I not been walking down this particular street at this particular moment of time, a potentially very bad accident would have occurred – which I was now able to avert. So, what then of running late? Had I been more “efficient” with any of my tasks at home or any of my errands, I would not have been at that particular place at that specific moment.

I suddenly had to let go of my particular frame around this day. My certainty that I was “behind” had been completely wrong. I was very, very grateful that I had been exactly where I was.

I couldn’t help but extrapolate this new perspective. What if, on the other days that I had felt equally impatient with my forward momentum (which was most days back then), I had been equally wrong? What if on at least some of those days – even if I didn’t so obviously prevent an accident – being exactly where I was, when I was, was equally just right? Maybe, had my timing been different, I would have been the one to have the accident, or the car behind me would have been able to go faster and might have had an accident. Or whatever – all the infinite number of whatevers that might have occurred, were I not where I was, when I was.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. There was obviously no way to know any of this, but I couldn’t avoid speculating. While I couldn’t know “what if”, I suddenly trusted all my going-too-slow judgments a lot less. All I really knew was that, on this particular afternoon, I seemed to have been exactly where – and at the exact right moment – that I was meant to be.

This all happened maybe seven years ago, and I still think about it. It has become a kind of symbol for me. These days, when I feel like I am running late (which is actually lots less often now), I am likely to remember that moment – and it upends my certainty. I may not, in every instance, go all the way to trusting that all is well – but I’m a lot humbler about trusting the idea that something is not well.

The Case Against “Personal Growth”

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve really got nothing against people investing time, energy and money on activities (“workshops”, “programs”) that would identify themselves as furthering “personal growth”, “consciousness raising”, etc. God knows there are lots of worse ways to keep busy. (I love the bumper sticker that says, “Jesus is coming – look busy.”)

And I, for sure, have – at other points in my life – also invested time, energy and money in many of the same kinds of activities. So I by no means want to suggest that there is anything wrong with this stuff. To do so would be exactly the kind of dualism that I describe in an earlier post. (One of my friends said to me recently, “I don’t really understand what is this dualism that you talk about, but I get it that it’s a bad thing.” That was pretty funny. Ok, let’s back up here and take another crack at this thing...)

No, rather than suggesting that there is anything less valuable or valid about keeping busy this way, I more want to make a case for why it can also be valid to take a pass – why, for some people at some points in their lives (like me, now) all these activities might actually not be all that valuable.

How can someone who once embraced all manner of personal growth activities now eschew them? Doesn’t that mean that he (me) is rigid, defensive or “stuck”?

I no longer have any desire to “grow”. I also have no interest in trying to shift (“expand”, “raise”, “liberate”) my consciousness. The emphasis there is on the word “try”. I honestly also don’t know exactly what “consciousness” is. I think it actually is a construct created by people who want to help you raise it.

Stephen Covey says to “Begin with the end in mind”. I don’t know that I actually want to make a habit of this, but this seems to be an instance where it actually might be useful. Where is all this going? “Where we are going” is a notion on which I and many of the growth purveyors would agree. If I said that where I am going is to more and more realize/feel/perceive/know that all of life is one and that I am a spiritual being having a human experience, I think that lots of these folks would stand up and salute. The real difference is in our perceptions of how to get there.

The way I see it, life is pretty much always working us over already. It gives us experience after experience offering the possibility of us seeing through the game of separateness (“Illusion”, “Maya”). Sometimes it gives us the lightest of nudges or even just a whisper, inviting us out of the prison of self. Other times it basically beats the crap out of us, all with a loving intent, to help us release our ferocious attachment to attachments – to all those things we think we need, including how we need to think of ourselves.

If life is the great workshop, then we don’t need to go seeking any teacher or facilitator, nor any modality/discipline/teaching/school or even any coach or counselor. What we really need is to slow down, breathe, relax – and begin to smell/taste/glimpse/hear the subtle hints that we are not alone.

Here’s the other kicker, though. I don’t believe there really is anything we can do to speed up the process. All this breathing, relaxing, tasting, etc. is stuff that surfaces in us when the time is right. Life has its own rhythm for waking us up. I won’t even claim to know exactly what “life” is, except that it is everything, including me. So that deeper level of me, underneath all the stuff that I think is me, is unfolding exactly right – and doesn’t need any goosing.

When people are inclined to attend a personal growth workshop, that is exactly right for them, then. But it just doesn’t make any difference. Whatever we are doing now is always perfect. It always is just what we are meant to be doing then - in fact, all that we could possibly be doing. The real sweetness is when we are gifted with moments of “getting” this (“seeing it” or whatever other metaphor). That’s when we are able to more let down into life.

Whether that moment surfaces when we are on a Vision Quest or walking down the street or enjoying a margarita with a friend – none of that makes any difference.

So, to my friends who are going off to a workshop, you have all my blessings. I think it’s perfect for you to be doing that. Just don’t try to recruit me.

Shy and Awkward

Yesterday I was in some kind of zone, where everything seemed to come easy. On my job at a hotel gift shop, I had wonderful little (and some not so little) interactions with lots of guests. I was fully available – and they seemed to sense this.

Two 12ish girls, bopping around the hotel, told me I was “cool” – pretty much the best affirmation one can get. And this cool-salute was based on nothing special – just, apparently, the tone in my voice and the fullness with which I greeted them. Maybe they like the way I welcomed them – like they were not just “kids”.

Today, on the contrary, I am shy and awkward. After church just now, I found myself awkwardly and abruptly breaking off conversations with people whom I really like – with whom I actually crave more connection. I even thought I recognized disappointment in some of them – or confusion, or I really don’t know what response – as I suddenly said, “Hey, have a great day” and pulled away.

I now am sitting here in the sun, having a smoke (I’ve relapsed again), just outside the coffee shop where I promised to meet a friend. I got my coffee to go, so I could come outside and smoke - and just can’t find it in myself to go back in. There are several of our mutual friends in there – Kent will have plenty of people with whom to visit.

A few minutes ago, I was kind of roughly critiquing myself. “What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong, period? If you were really getting this Life Lived More Deeply stuff, about which you have been writing so much, you wouldn’t be so unable to hunker down and be with people – so not, today, available for connection.”

Then I got it – at least a glimpse of it. “Living Life More Deeply” means embracing this moment, whatever the content of this moment. Today’s shyness is no better or worse than yesterday’s gregarious fun. Be with this.

Then I realized that I wanted to write about this. (I’m really glad I had a good little notebook with me – though I most always do.) On this raw, windy early March day, I’ve found this delightful spot – in the sun and out of the wind – and I’m writing. This is my gift to others and my gift from life. I am doing exactly that which I am meant to be doing. And if I had not found this window into this particular form of flow - if I was still wandering around kind of lost – that also would be perfect.

Pema Chodron, the wonderful, so-compassionate American teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, would ask, “Can I soften my heart into this moment?” I have the opportunity to embrace this particular pain, knowing that it truly leaves me not alone, as I was just feeling, but intimately connected with all the thousands (millions?) of my brothers and sisters around the world who are right now experiencing this kind of pain, or something like it. I can breathe in this pain we are all feeling, open my heart to it – then breathe out compassion, not just for me, but for all of us.

I don’t have to be some kind of expert at Living Life More Deeply, some kind of oneness hotshot (there’s a wonderful oxymoron). We are always teaching that which we are trying to learn. The Course In Miracles says that if I’m not getting as much from this moment of teaching/ counseling/coaching as the person to whom I am “giving” this attention, then something is out of kilter.

So, I’ll breathe and write, knowing that none of this has taken away my shy awkwardness, that – if I do now buck up my courage and go into this coffee shop, I am likely not going to feel much more comfortable than I did a few minutes ago. But, with a little luck, some part of me will wink a little wink at this shy, awkward soul, knowing that I am, in this moment, walking my walk just as much as I did yesterday. In fact, this awkward moment is the only experience I could be having right now – is absolutely, utterly perfect.

Our Desires

I recently got one of those forwarded emails with warm fuzzy messages, called “Being Thankful”. The first item was:

“Be thankful that you don't already have everything you desire. If you did, what would there be to look forward to?”

I’m also thankful that life doesn’t give me everything I desire. What a mess that would be.

Winking

Asheville is a very friendly town. People tend to greet each other, walking down the street. If you make eye contact, it is a little abnormal (out of the norm) to not somehow acknowledge the other person. I still get a kick out of how prevalent is the southern “Hey”, instead of my Midwest “Hi”.

But I’ve been having a lot of fun lately just winking at people.

Actually it’s a whole range of facial cues, not just winking. I wish I could see them all – I might be better equipped to describe them. I know that a lot of it has to do with things I do with my mouth. Also raising my eyebrows – sometimes maybe paired with opening my eyes wide, the opposite of a wink.

I know that my spate of these little eruptive expressions has something to do with my current impulse to greet even more folks, without going through the whole drill of forming words, or even making sounds – especially when our eye contact is so minimal that words might feel forced, like too much. My face has always tended to be fairly expressive, and my penchant for physical comedy has involved things I do with my face as well as the rest of my body. Many of these little acknowledging expressions – as best as I know, never having seen them – carry a very light quality, cute and fun if not actually comic. I think the people I am greeting enjoy these little acknowledgements and that these come across as less odd than they would in a less greety town.

I wrote the title for this piece sitting out in the sun just now, then walked into the coffee shop where several of my friends had pulled up too many chairs around a teensy little table. It really was kind of a little gaggle of us.

Robin and I like each other, although our relationship is based more on greeting and sometimes hugging each other than on a whole lot of conversation. She was sitting across from me – way too far to even touch fingers. There, just maybe two minutes after writing this title, she gave me the most absolutely comic series of winks, eyebrow raisings, twitches and nervous tics that I have maybe ever seen. It was not only delightful in and of itself, but so synchronistic, on the heels of having just set myself the agenda to write about winks. I just had to go around the table, pull up a chair behind her (no room by the table) and tell her of this cute little cosmic joke. She got a kick out of it, but – in this town, where synchronicity happens more and faster – neither of us was especially surprised.

And that’s maybe the point. We are all connected – in ways large and small, obvious and subtle, visible and invisible, serious and silly. And that’s what I’m wanting to acknowledge, without going through all the rigmarole of words.