Working It Out

The coastal temperate climate provides a perfect afternoon for a run in the hills: not too hot, but warm enough to work up a sweat while I burn through some vexing issues that have troubled me through the week. I drive to Mount Work and limber up in the parking lot, trying to convince myself that I’m not running up hills as a form of castigation, but rather as a means of self exploration. It almost works.

I’ve been trying to start my hills runs more slowly to give my body a few minutes to warm up before I really start pounding the trails. Instead, my ego gets the better of me this afternoon and I start off fast, passing several hikers, and cursing myself as I hit the first serious climb and my legs congeal as if filled with cement. I labour up the first grade and run on the balls of my feet across a rib of exposed stone through the dark woods, and then mount the next climb, breathing easier, focusing on easing my legs back into fluid motion.

Its been a hard week. There was one really hard day, to be exact, which has given me a lot to work through, and I’m hammering up this trail in part to let my body sort through my conundrums that my head and heart cannot.

The foundation of my struggle this week was this: the window through which I view the world is centred in “object referral,” where my fear of external approval, external forces, external power rules my emotional state. If I feel threatened, if others exert power over me, if the things I want in life are in danger, I feel emotionally unbalanced. In the past, this has lead me into deep depressions that have at times been dangerous.

What I want is to view the world through “self referral,” where my spirit rules my emotional state. I want my emotional balance to be dependent on my own fluid sense of myself.

Three things happened in rapid succession on Tuesday of this week that brought this duality into sharp relief: a threat around housing, a challenge with my relationship with my children, and insecurity in my love life. In each case, I was able to use some fancy internal alchemy/spiritual aikido to move through the challenges, all of which are evolving, but my emotional turbulence revealed how much more work I need to do.

On Tuesday some friends and I looked at the two adjacent properties to the Fernwood home I am currently renting, with an eye to purchasing all three. The one-hundred year old homes are all on a single lot, making them an anomaly, and a zoning nightmare. The idea was we three friends would purchase the homes either by creating a co-op and each holding one of three shares, or possibly sub-divide the lots and own them outright. But the middle home is in rough shape, and one of my friends felt suddenly overwhelmed by her own busy life, and opted out. It left me feeling somewhat threatened with the possibility of not controlling my own living space. I felt at the whim of an absentee landlord who could turn around and sell the home I am living in at any time.

That evening I picked up Rio, my five year old, along with Andy, Kat’s new man, and we went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Rio and Silas had stayed at my place the night before, and were to stay with me after the movie, but things didn’t work out that way. Little Silas fell asleep at Kat’s place while Rio, Andy and I were at the movie, and when we got home, Rio said that he wanted to stay at his mom’s too.

I quickly accepted this. What’s the point of fighting the will of a five year old to sleep at his mothers? The hardest thing for both Kathleen and I about our separation has been to let go of seeing our children on a daily basis. Being able to let go of the prescribed plan, and release my intense desire to have my boys with me for more than a night at a time, was a Herculean effort of will. By the time I got home I was feeling quite despondent. I called and talked with Andy to make sure that he and Kat knew that I was simply “going with the flow” by leaving the boys, and not dumping them because I didn’t want them around. Andy told me he knew that, and then told me that “I was a good man” for being able to accept the change in circumstances. That helped.

The final event of the day is too sensitive, to complex for public airing, but it has to do with my tangled love life. Suffice to say that there is someone who has suddenly appeared in my life in recent weeks, quite unexpectedly, with whom I share an intense physical and spiritual attraction. That day I received an email saying that she wasn’t sure if she and I could be together, despite that connection, for reasons too involved and personal to divulge here.

It was a triple blow, and thinking about it as I weave my way up the sun dappled flank of Mount Work, I am amazed that one of my clients didn’t call to tell me that the money had run out too, just so that I would have the opportunity to face all of my insecurities at once.

Its obvious to me that each of these challenges were driven by my fears: fear of not having a place to live, where I can care for my children and have a space for creativity, for friends and family; fear of being without my children, of not being a part of their daily lives; fear of being alone, of failure in love.

My fear, in part, is a product of needing external factors forces to make me feel secure. I have been enslaved by my fears for most of my life, and I’m sick and tired of it.

Deepak Chopra says:

“The experience of the Self, or “self-referral,” means that our internal reference point is our own spirit, and to the objects of our experience. The opposite of self–referral is object-referral. In object-referral we are always influenced by objects outside the Self, which include situations, circumstances, people and things. In object-referral we are constantly seeking the approval of others. Our thinking and our behaviour are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based.”

I want my happiness to be dependent on nothing that is outside my Self. Of course, the Self isn’t merely contained by the seemingly linear sack of skin, bones, muscle and tissue called The Body. Its much more than that. In my finest moments I am connected, by the pulse of life, by the throb of love, to all things, all beings.

When I am fearful, I am not.

When I am fearful, I feel a constriction in my chest. My shoulders close in. I feel the thread of white light that connects me with those I love being constrained as my heart is pulled back inside me, cloaked by a darker energy that wants to protect it from harm. The feeling of bliss, where I am aware of The Self being so much more than just the limited, and seemingly static physical me, is not possible when I guard my heart this way.

Chopra continues:

“In object-referral we also feel an intense need to control things. We feel an intense need for external power. The need for approval, the need to control things, and the need to for external power are needs that are based on fear. This kind of power is not the power of pure potentiality, or the power of the Self, or real power. When we experience the power of the Self, there is an absence of fear, there is no compulsion to control, and no struggle for approval or external power.”

Control is the opposite of spontaneity. I’ve worked hard throughout my life to embrace spontaneity, with varying degrees of success. The three challenges I faced last Tuesday all seem to stem from this struggle.

I need to control my physical surroundings, to have control over my personal security – the four walls that shelter me and my children. I need to feel in control of the relationship with my children. I need to feel in control of my love life, of my physical and spiritual connection with another person.

Of course, all of these things are beyond my control. Certainly my children are – they are their own beings, their own spirits, guided into this world by Kathleen and I, but already forging their own relationship with each of us, with other important people around them, with each other, and with themselves.

Even with all the money in the world, the fantasy of control over the most basic of human needs – shelter – is illusionary.

And as for matters of the heart: the very best it would seem that I can do is to offer my heart without fear, anticipation or regret and then let go of all expectation, surrendering to my belief that our natural state is to be boundlessly in love, because love itself is the life force of the universe. How that love weaves itself with the life force of another will be forever a mystery to me.

Relinquishing control, and being open to spontaneity, to the possibilities that each rich, magical moment brings is part of the path that I am running.

The summit of Mount Work is a bulbous, rocky promenade, flanked by arbutus trees, and open to the horizon of hills, and ocean and sky that makes living on the west coast a daily delight. What will tomorrow bring? Magic and mystery and wonder, no doubt. And likely pain and fear too, as I sometimes push and sometimes ease my way through the duality of self- and object-referral.

Being open to that mystery means that I am gaining comfort in relinquishing the illusion of control. Where will I live, how will my children be present in my life, how well can I love another soul? Mysteries all, but for the assurance that if I can truly become rooted in the confidence of my own spirit, my own heart, then regardless of how the mystery manifests, I will be capable of embracing it with joy, with bliss.

Entanglement, bliss and Moby's downbeat, hotel blues

I’m not sure what it says about me that I experienced a moment of bliss while driving. I’m pretty sure it makes be a bad environmentalist, or maybe a good spokesperson for the Subaru Impreza.

It wasn’t really about the car.

Driving out to Royal Roads University for a morning of meetings and interviews about the Bateman Centre, I was listening to Moby’s album Hotel. I haven’t listened to this album much in the last year, though there was a time that I couldn’t stop. I associate it with darker days, when I was plagued by a deep depression, though the album itself is reasonably upbeat. There are a few songs on the album, such as Dream of Me, which are filled with the longing that fuelled my sadness during the period leading up to my separation from Kathleen. With that chapter nearly a year in the rear view mirror of my life, I found that I no longer need to connect that album with despair.

One of my favourite tracks on the album is called Slipping Away, and in it there is a line that goes “all that we needed tonight are people who love us, and light.”

As I listened to that line I felt myself slipping into the space where the boundary between me and things around me began to blur. I consciously invited the sensation, and allowed it to linger, so that for several minutes I experienced the "cold fire" about which I have written previously. It wasn’t so much that I was feeling connected to my immediate surroundings, i.e. my little Impreza, the Walmart I was passing or Highway 1. Instead, I felt connected at that moment to everybody whom I love, and to everybody who loves me. It was as if a silver thread of light extended from my heart to the hearts of so many others around the world.

People who love us, and light. At the moment of creation, when some tiny ball of nuclear energy exploded, sending forth the swirling clouds of matter that would form into our universe, everything that we know in this world was touching. I’ve read that physicists, working with infinitesimally small particles of matter, have demonstrated that if you separate two such particles form one another, and subject one of them to stimulus, the other responds at the exact same moment as the one it has been separated from. There isn’t even a millisecond delay by which some form of communications might be transmitted from one particle to the next. They have deducted that somehow, beyond what our naked senses can determine, that these particles are still connected.

The quantum leap (not the kind where an electron leaps its orbit, silly) that they have taken is that because at the moment of creation everything was touching, it is all still connected in a way we can’t see, or touch, or taste or hear. This is the theory of entanglement as I understand it.

Bliss to me is the sensation of feeling connected to everything and everyone; it is the blurring of the imaginary lines that separate us from one another. Bliss is how entanglement feels.

Of late I’ve been receiving random gestures and expressions of love from friends and family. It is the most beautiful thing to hear a voice on the phone, or read a note in my email, or to receive a message over Facebook or Skype (this is the 21st Century remember) that says I love you; you are a good man; I am thinking about you and sending you peace. What a gift to give one another!

Distance and time are rendered irrelevant when you take the leap of faith required to see that everything is connected, and that those connections are actually illusionary in nature, so that its not so much that everything is still touching, but that everything is simply a part of everything else. Still. The big bang might have sent us hurtling through time and space, but it was our own minds, informed by our dim senses, that created our notion that time can generate distance between events and space could separate us from one other.

It looks that way, but it just isn’t so.

Dreaming Freedom

I’ve started a daily practice of meditation. I’ve been thinking about doing this for some time, but never felt as though I knew what meditation really was. I still don’t: I’ve just decided to stop letting that get in the way.

I sit for half an hour in the morning, and sometimes, If I’m not too tired, or haven’t had too much booze, I sit again in the evening. I get up early so I can do this before Rio and Silas wake. I follow each session with a reading from Deepak Chopra’s book “The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire.” There are seven principles towards the conclusion of the book that are intended to be guides towards the attainment of what he calls syncrodestiny, which I interpret to be a place of lasting peace, where we become interwoven with the fabric of the universe and are able to harness that unlimited sense of connectivity, creativity and infinite coincidence to bring anything we want into our lives: love, abundance, bliss.

This morning’s meditation session was turbulent. Ok, they are all pretty turbulent, so far. In the thirty minutes I sit, I find that for about ten minutes I am fantasising, for ten minutes I’m replaying old fears and failures, and for about ten minutes I’m labouring towards what Chopra calls “the gap” between thoughts, where we can glimpse our own soul. I don’t think I’ve even gotten a peak at my soul yet. There were some dancing lights the other day, and I have experienced the feeling I describe as bliss a couple of times. I’ve also fallen asleep once or twice.

During my sit this morning I was startled to hear, as clear as a bell, a voice yelling “no!” inside my head. I think it was my own voice. I observed this, as I’ve been taught, and then stepped past it to try and slip into the gap again. But with the voice came a flood of images of my children, and the tidal wave of fear I harbour about loosing them as Kathleen and I move deeper into our separation, and as she welcomes a new (and very wonderful) man into her life, and the home she shares with our kids.

I was deeply relieved when the buzzer went off in the kitchen, and I could open my eyes and pick up Chopra’s book to read that day’s principle. It was a simple statement: Moksha, I am emotionally free.

See what I mean about infinite coincidence?

As I got to the sutra statements for this principle I sat down in the tiny sunroom on the front of my Fernwood home and sipped a cup of tea. The first statement was:

Imagine that you are without physical form, a field of awareness everywhere at all times.

That was easy enough. Then:

Imagine that you have left behind forever any sense of anger or resentment.

Reading that passage I burst into tears.

For most of my life I have been coiled in anger. Its source isn’t yet known to me, but the pain of it has plagued me since high school, or earlier. Imagining that I had left it behind forever was so liberating! I closed my eyes and thought about how good it will feel to have shed its clutching skin like a snake, and then let that feeling pulse through my body, and out into the wider world.

Its not an easy path, this one towards emotional freedom. I find that I am constantly stubbing my toe on rocks and roots in the tangled darkness. But dreaming of this freedom, and imagining it becoming part of the fabric of my waking self, is light enough to find my way.

Does it Love Me?

Yesterday was a stunningly beautiful day. Sunny and hot in the city, when we drove up the coast the light onshore breeze made it easy to spend the day in comfort out or doors. Kathleen, Silas, Rio and I traveled together to China Beach. Thought Kat and I have been separated for nearly a year now, we have made a commitment to do this sort of thing together with our children. We think its important to spend time together with them, for their sake – so they can be around both of their parents at once – and for ours: so we can spend time in contemplation and wonder of their lives. We had an amazing day, with a great deal of love between us all in a way I’m sure many separated and divorced couples hope they can interact, learn, grow and share.

Of the many highlights of the day was a moment towards the end of the afternoon when Rio, his keen eye always roving for details, found a tiny beetle in the sand. He gently picked it up and spent a good ten minutes examining it, allowing it to crawl over his hands and arms, looking at it from every possible angle. Finally Rio looked at me and asked, “Does it love me?”

My first thought was, no, of course not, it’s a beetle, it doesn’t experience love as we do.

But I thought about this a moment before saying anything. Then I responded with something like this: “Yes, it does love you. You and the beetle are made up of the same fabric of the universe. And that fabric is bound together by the energy of love. Just as the beetle must love its own life, it must naturally love you, because you and the beetle, and everything else for that matter, are all connected in a way we can only catch fleeting glimpses of.”

That seemed to satisfy Rio, because next he asked if he could give the beetle a corn chip.

I thought about that question – love, not the corn chip - when I got home, and again this morning before and after meditation.

Implicit in the question seemed to be a statement that Rio loved the beetle. On its own, I find that impossibly beautiful. That Kat and I have raised children who feel capable of love for nature, for creation, for the “other,” is beyond my wildest dreams.

As part of my new found practice of twice daily meditation, I read a set of daily sutras to guide my understanding of my place in the universe. This morning’s was Aham Brahmasmi. It means, “The core of my being is the ultimate reality, the root and ground of the universe, the source of all that exists.”

Deepak Chopra, says of this sutra:

“You and I and the universe are the same. I am the universe, localized in a single human being. You are also the universe, localized in your body. We both exists only as particular ripples in the conscious intelligence field. Every aspect of ourselves is articulated and orchestrate by this boundless non-local intelligence, the endless sea of consciousness from which you and I are the universe arise.”

We are ripples in the sea of the universe. All life, all existence is an ocean, and we are individual waves; temporary, unique, where the boundaries between ourselves and the life around us is imaginary, a product of sensory perception attuned not for total understanding, but for culturally driven minimalism. Simply stated, our senses aren’t attuned to see, hear and feel the universe as it must really be because its complexity is so vast that we would likely go blitheringly mad trying to live our strange, material lives otherwise. We see the boundaries between us not because they are real, but because we have always been taught that they are real, and because the path that humanity has taken requires them to be real.

Love is the energy that connects my wave to yours. My wave to Rio’s. Rio’s wave to the beetles. Love is the portal through which we slip together into a more total understanding of what our world, our universe, really is, where boundaries between one life and the next are fuzzy waves more than rigid lines. Love is the means by which we can tap into the limitless potential this boundless universe brings.

So, yes my dear boy Rio, the beetle loves you, just as you love it. And yes, I’m certain it would like a corn chip.