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.