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.

Sound Meditation

Whereas vision, the lead sense for most of us, seems especially set up for perceiving separation (“This is not that”, “These two things are disconnected from each other”), sound is much more available to be perceived as waves washing over us. It is much more feasible to not separate this sound from that sound, to let it all join together as one unbroken tapestry of sound.

This is obviously not automatic. Our mind still likes to identify, categorize and name the sounds we hear. It's fairly difficult to absolutely tune out this part of our brain that wants to identify and even make value judgments about the sounds we hear. I love doing this exercise as I am walking around town, but I do notice this identifying and judging process in my brain: bird sounds – good, car sounds – bad, expressway sounds – very bad.

But it is pretty doable to at least partly to unhook from this conceptual process, to go back to the raw data – especially if we choose to do this and invest just the slightest bit of mental discipline around it.

Today is a windy, raw, early March day. When I let go of my griping about the weather, especially the wind, that very wind stirs up some very cool sounds (still identified by me, but after at least a brief moment of just hearing): leaf skittering across the sidewalk, stop sign rattling, wind blowing across my ears. A couple of the coolest sounds sat unjudged – even unidentified - only for a moment: paper bag crinkling under a car tire, plastic cup making its noisy way down the street. After that delicious moment of just hearing, the judgment “litter – bad” asserted itself. But, because I was so much grokking sounds during that walk, it was really not that hard to let go of the mentalizing and drop back into the gloriously diverse sounds.

Just a few minutes earlier, I was really having a ball surrendering to the sounds in a coffee shop where I was sitting with some friends. There were two separate conversations burbling along among my friends – one at 2 o’clock and one at about 11. One way I love to release myself from the conceptual part of my brain and thirstily drink in the sounds around me is to let go of decoding the words and conversations I hear. It is easier to do this when I don’t know the conversers – somehow, some part of me feels it is “supposed to” be a “good listener” when friends are talking, but in the coffee shop just now there were so many other threads or eruptions of sound that it was really not too hard to stop “listening to” my friends’ conversations and simply hear them.

Some of the other sounds I did identify and partly decode, but not completely: other conversations in the room, a musical soundtrack (more seducing me to “understand” because there were lyrics, not just sound). But the juiciest sounds were all the little rattles, bangs, thumps and tinkles coming from behind the counter. They were so much fun partly because I literally did not “know” what they were. I could speculate about their origins, if I chose (and sometimes I did): refrigerator door closing, lattes being whipped by that little wand they stick in them, etc. But, combined with all the other sounds in the room, it was relatively easy to just let them rise and then fall away, just as the sounds they were – no identity.

I had really a lot of luck just letting my hearing swim around the room – words at 11 o’clock, music, bop at three o’clock (behind the counter), words at 2 o’clock, words also at 2 o’clock but somewhere further back in the room (sometimes I couldn’t stop myself from looking to see what table I thought they were coming from, but that less disrupted the ocean of sound than actually being able to make out the words - and sometimes I also let the origin fall away into irrelevance).

I think my friends may have thought I was stoned (especially since they were, for some synchronistic reason, talking about marijuana – which I have laid off for a lot of years, but, surprisingly, most of them in this conversation, which – yes – I was at least intermittently decoding, apparently still actively partake of). So I was behaving somewhat oddly (another judgment), sitting outside the conversation and looking a little maybe aloof, maybe spaced out, maybe just disengaged. At one point, one friend – directly across from me, so he maybe saw my unusually floating presence – said, “You’ve got to stop interrupting so much, Majo.” I didn’t have much trouble coming back with, “I can’t help it, I’m just a buttinsky”, then dropping out again to the symphony of lush coffee shop sounds.

Here at work now in my little gift shop in a big downtown hotel, I’ve gotten caught up in a couple of (really pretty fun) conversations, which have pulled me back to the world of meaning, as opposed to simple audition. (These sounds are all auditioning and none of them have been voted out yet.) But I think the conversations have been so much fun partly because I have brought an easy, free presence to them – and I’m showing up this way just because of my somewhat extended, luxurious sound bath.

Now the other conversers have departed. I’m in my little conceptual bubble of writing. But I’m almost finished with this little piece. Once I have let go of the headlong momentum of this writing, maybe I’ll just drop back into the sounds around me. Maybe. I’ve got a little list going of other pieces pushing through to be written today by me – a big turn-on for the writer in me – but maybe I’ll just let some sounds visit me first.

We’ll see.

What is "spiritual"?

Lots of people in my circle like to say that they are not “religious”, but “spiritual”. I understand how someone might not want to be identified with any specific religion – but what does it mean to be “spiritual”?

We like to think that certain activities or experiences are somehow more spiritual than others – maybe meditation, prayer, chanting, etc. We even think that some people are more spiritual than others. Then we complicate the whole mess further by using terms like “very spiritual”, “deeply spiritual” or – my favorite mess-creator – “spiritually evolved”.

Let’s come at it from a different angle. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. This one works for me. But what does it mean?

For me, the fundamental spiritual reality is that all of life is totally connected – there is no seam, no in/out, no better/worse, no higher or lower. Seeing life in terms of those antagonistic pairs is dualism – I wrote about this in an earlier post.

Having a human experience means that we got crammed into a body, with a sensory apparatus that sees things as separate - and a mind that functions largely by analysis, by taking things apart, by assigning things to categories. Our language supports this: subject – verb – object. This separate being does something to that separate being. In science, the mechanistic view of the universe (being challenged now by quantum physics) sees the world in terms of billiard balls enlessly bouncing off of each other. Causality – this caused that.

The spiritual perspective is the dawning awareness that all truly is one, that nothing is separate. Every bit of the mix is totally connected with everything else.

Then, from this viewpoint, what thing or experience could be more spiritual than anything else? Who could be more spiritual than anyone else? A “spiritual experience” might actually be the momentary glimpse of a reality where no experiences are any more spiritual than any others. It’s the big game of hide and seek. We get progressively more peeks, intuitions, subtle messages that there is something more going on under the hood.

Someone who totally gets it, so that now their awareness of this oneness never wavers, is called “enlightened” or “Self-realized”. They realize that, under their small s self, there is this one ocean of life that is all of us. Being enlightened, they take their small s self lightly – they know that it’s not who they really are.

It’s all connected, but the game we got plugged into makes it look like we are separate, different. Why did it get set up this way? Maybe so that, when we get it about our essential connectedness, we really get it.

The Course in Miracles says that we all have already come home to this awareness, the game is over and life (which is all of us) has won – but we are still caught up in a big dream of separation, a dream from which we gradually wake. Some quantum theorists say that it’s all happening at the same time.

If everything is connected, that would mean not just everything now, but everything, period – regardless of what time tag it has on it. When we have a precognition of some event that, when we separate the present from the future, has not yet happened, we’re not really psychic. We have access to that information because we are completely connected with all that is.

Same thing for centuries-old memories. We don’t have to posit “reincarnation”, we don’t have to think, “That was me back there.” If nothing is separate, then “we” have access to all that information, all the time. When people ask Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, about reincarnation, he points to the ego-trap in thinking that there is some fundamental “me”, separate from the endless flow of life. He says “I teach that I am not the same now as I was a minute ago. So who is it that would be reincarnated?”

One of my teachers liked the metaphor that we all came out of one big batch of cookie dough, but we got shaped, pulled apart, cut up into all these different pieces. Then we walk around thinking we are all different.

Is it the taste or the smell that breaks down the illusion? Is being caught in the illusion somehow less spiritual than starting to see through it? Ah, there’s that dualistic trap again. We want to break off one experience from another. Oh, well, little by little….

Fortune Cookies

I never put much stock in fortune cookies, until about 20 years ago.

My friend Mark and I were having lunch in a nice, very informal little Chinese restaurant just down the street from me. (If there were such a thing as a Chinese diner, this would have been it.) Mark and I had a fairly strong relationship, including him at one point renting office space from me in my really too-large office suite – and also, after his girlfriend threw him out, staying with me for a while in my equally-too-large rented farmhouse on a lovely piece of land about 15 minutes from downtown Syracuse, NY. (One of the joys of Syracuse – which almost made up for the long, snowy winters – was having such easy access to nice country.)

Taking in housemates helped my social needs – and helped me pay the rent. The house also had a huge living room, which I used to host a variety of personal growth workshops. I even gave the place a cute little name, Harmony Farm, and a nice little map that showed it as being located halfway between Syracuse and California.

Mark had moved back into town – he was essentially a city boy, who mostly did not appreciate our idyllic, bucolic location. As we finished our meal, he was asking me how things were going out at Harmony Farm. I was exactly in the middle of telling him how much I liked my current housemate and how good the vibe was out there, when I opened a fortune cookie that said, "Harmony in the home”. Now that got my attention. If it had said, “Happiness in the home”, “Harmony in your life”, etc., it would not have seemed like such extraordinary synchronicity. I started paying more attention to these little strips of white paper inside these virtually inedible crunchy little cookies (with mostly nothing better for dessert in the typical Chinese restaurant).

Over the next many years, I got some fortunes that seemed stupid and irrelevant and some that genuinely strove to be meaningful, but related to my life in no way that I could come up with. And some real winners. Actually, well more than half the fortunes I have opened up since then have seemed interesting at least – and many that have hit me right between the eyes, that have seemed at least as much tailored for my specific life situation as that original “Harmony” fortune.
In the last 20 years, I have almost always had one or more cool fortunes taped above my desk. My current posted fortune was opened about two years ago, shortly after moving from Chicago to Asheville, NC. Part of what kept me going in this new town, where I moved knowing not one soul, was the constant support and well-wishing from my friends back in Chicago and other parts of the country. This fortune said, “Friends all joy in your success.” I suppose that could have fit for lots of people, but it seemed especially meaningful to me. Not the kind of knockout synchronicity as “Harmony in the home”, but I still really liked it.

A few months ago, a customer at the gas station where I was working as a cashier, came up eating one of those little Dove chocolates, individually wrapped in foil – and gave me three. (She was a regular and did, I think, already know of my monster sweet tooth.) These individual chocolates carry their own little fortunes, inscribed on the inside of the foil.

The three she gave me were pretty amazing.

I was at that point facing some pretty significant challenges in my life – more even than usual – and was consciously struggling to embrace this juncture, to trust that nothing was going wrong, that life really only meant me well. So the first little enfoiled message said, “Dare to love completely.” Again, really something that could be meaningful to anyone at any point in his or her life, but I liked it a lot.

The second felt even more specifically pointed towards me. In the context of all these life challenges, this guy who usually would be characterized as a go-with-the-flow type, was telling my friends that I was pushing hard to get through this period, that it seemed I needed to, if I was possibly going to reach some calmer, easier shore. So this little chocolaty message (chocolate being my favorite food group, by a long shot) said, “Go against the grain.” This seemed a lot less generic than loving completely – and I could think of no previous period in my life when this message would have fit for me.

But it was the third message that totally knocked my socks off, that left me giving the other fortunes even more credence.

I for many years have not liked red clothes. I was told by someone along the way that my natural coloring was winter, or something like that, and that red was not a good color for me. And, with my ruddy Irish complexion, red – especially shirts – never looked good on me. (I suppose red pants would not have looked all that great, either.)

But there I was, standing at the window of our little booth at this gas station, wearing my red uniform shirt. So this fortune says, “Guess what, you look good in red”!! Now, how the hell do I explain that? Even the sassy little introduction, “Guess what”, seemed to emphasize that life was having a great little joke with me. I immediately, after shaking my head and walking around the little booth, muttering something like “Now, how in the hell…?”, taped that round little bit of foil above the window. My two colleagues, neither of whom liked our uniform shirts, got a kick out of it, too.

So, now I repeat, “How in the hell…?” – or maybe heaven. I left that fortune at the gas station and took the other two home, where they still adorn the top of my bathroom mirror. Since I got through that especially difficult period, I’m not sure that “Go against the grain” still has significance for me, but it feels like it somehow does. Maybe not so globally as to fight against the difficulty of my life, but for those moments when going with the flow truly does not feel like the right response.

And “Dare to love completely” remains a key little mantra for me. Again, probably a nice bit of coaching for anyone, at any point in their life, but – paired with that crazy little message about looking good in red – my response is basically, “OK, life, I get the message.”

Now, I’ll say it again, “How in the heaven…?” What’s going on here? Is there something especially magical about fortune cookies and Dove chocolates? I don’t think so.

I really do believe that synchronicity is everywhere around us, all the time – we just don’t see it or pay any attention to it. Then sometimes we do pay attention. I’ve written in an earlier post how birds sometimes get my attention – how seeing a particular favorite bird (especially ones you don’t see every day, like great blue herons) at a particular moment seems to signal something like, “It’s ok, the truth of life is not the chaos you now see. Everything is connected and you can trust the moment”. And that’s how I think fortune cookies work. Birds get my attention because I have invested them with synchronistic properties. Fortune cookies get my attention because they claim to have significant little messages.

But the truth, I more and more believe, is that all of life is always astonishingly, magically interwoven – and that sometimes we are just more in tune, or more needing to have life get our attention. It certainly is clear to me that the more I read about, write about, journal about synchronicity, the more I see it all around me. Call me a goof, a budding mystic, or simply more and more recognizing the underlying truth of life – call me whatever, these fortunes, foil wrappers and birds really do work for me.