Today was a gift. It was a stollen day. I was supposed to fly to Vancouver for a meeting, but the gig got postponed until Friday, so I had a day without appointments. A storm that was supposed to blow in this morning got stalled up Island, and its only now, at the end of the afternoon, that the sky is darkening. The morning was bright and clear and crisp; a perfect autumn day. I ran.
I didn’t really want to at first. I was a little stuck, so I started slowly in a lazy circumnavigation of Mount Doug. Maybe it was the colour of the big leaf maple leaves littering the forest floor, or maybe it was the crack in the air that pushed my lungs out and let my blood soak in lots of O2; whatever it was, I negotiated another threshold that I wasn’t expecting to cross today, and it was exhilerating.
I’ve written elsewhere that I realized just before Kathleen and I separated last August that I’ve spent most of my life believing I don’t deserve success. In life, love, business, in family matters. I’ve never felt that I deserved to fail. Only that success, true success, was supposed to be beyond my reach.
This morning, running along the forested trail on the north-east side of Mount Doug, it suddenly dawned on me that I’ve been successful in love, and not allowed myself to let it last. I have had women in my life who have loved me. Who were tender with me. Who adored me. I even felt safe with them. And I left them. I had what seemed like good reasons, both at the time, and now. I wouldn't make those decisions differently now. You can’t go back and make decisions over, and I’m not so foolish as to second guess what were carefully weighed choices at the time. But I was loved. And I left.
Something in me seems to fundamentally believe that even when I have a degree of success – for no relationship will ever be perfect – that I have to wreck it. Subconsciously (at least until this morning) I determine that I don’t deserve something so good (I can’t believe you’re with me….) and I set up conditions to make the relationship fail. I cheat. I get restless. I let my anger, my fear overtake me. I forget to be kind, to love. To love.
This might be overly simplistic. I might need to think this through, but I’ve got to say, I am really done with that. I'm done wrecking my own sucess because somehow I fear it.
I have love in my life now too. I feel safe. I feel adored. I long for the barriers to drop away. I long for what I know we both deserve.
As I raced through the stolen morning of sunshine, a riot of colour and an empty day on the calendar, I decided that I will not destroy my own sucess again. I will not settle for anything less than love in my life. I’m open to how that shows up. I’m accepting that it may appear differently than what I expect. I know it will have its ups and downs. But I deserve to be loved, to be treated tenderly, and to be treated with kindness. And my lover deserves the same: to not be subjected to my anger, to my fear.
My children deserve to have a father who is envoleoped by love. My friends deserve that too. So do the people I work with who are trying to save the world.
I am at my best when I feel loved. When I feel safe. When I am adored. When I can love, give comfort, pleasure, and adoration in return. I’m ready to accept that I deserve this. I wish that we all could see that we deserve love.
And when I experience it next, I won’t run away.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Saturday, October 13, 2007
The 29th Day
Today is day 28.
I hadn’t really thought of it until a few days ago. I looked at the calendar tonight and saw that it had been four weeks, one full moon, since something so beautiful, so tender, so difficult, passed out of my life.
Maybe forever.
Maybe not.
It has been a very challenging, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes agonizing 28 days. Not just for me. I’m not alone. Another shares this sorrow. But I can only write of my own journey, it’s the only I know. Even though that knowledge is so imperfect.
“What pattern is this teaching you about?” I hear Dan’s voice in my head. It was just this week that he brought me to the brink of tears – likely sobbing tears – in the middle of the Royal Roads Café. Loving bastard.
What patterns?
That my challenge is to stay. My challenge is to stick it out. Leaving would be easier. By no means easy. Just easier. Leaving would mean some short term pain, agony, but it would pass in time, and I could move on. There would be scar tissue. Some things simply don’t heal any more. But in a month, or two, or maybe three, I could move on. That’s my pattern. When the going gets tough, I walk away. I’m choosing to stay this time. As long as I can.
Sometimes the right thing to do is stop. Sometimes, things aren't right and the only thing to do is stop. "Know when to stop," advises Lao Tzu. Fine. Right now doesn't feel like the right time for me to walk.
Patterns....
That I fear fear itself. It is ice water in my veins. Fear closes my heart. Fear is the opposite of love. Fear kills love. I dread the cold hand of fear on my chest, on my throat. When I feel it taking its grip, I do anything I can to not feel it. But I am learning to invite fear in. Instead of running of late, I am learning to “sit through” fear’s icy wash. What’s the worst that can happen?
I guess I could die of fright….Likely not.
That I like quick fixes. I remember one morning receiving an email that released the icy wash of fear through me and before I had finished reading the note, I was reaching for the phone, making it worse. The thought of sitting through my day with the intensely uncomfortable emotions that the note, my own stupidity, and the uncertainty it evoked was unbearable. But my haste to try and fix the problem only made it worse. Lao Tzu advises restraint as one of the three pillars of the Tao te Ching. Step back, he says. Wait. Sit through it.
That uncertainty and vulnerability are also my nemesis’s, and that I seem to attract them into my life.
So what are these patterns teaching me?
I’ve been pretty focused on the notion of self referral of late, and that my attempts at staying completely centred in my own soul, my own spirit has lead me to some pretty sophisticated forms of self loathing. I’m in the middle of one of the most emotionally challenging situations of my life, and I’m beating myself up because I can’t stay detached from its ebbs and flows! One day I’m high as a kite, and the next I’m whale poop, and brow beating myself for not staying “at the centre of the river” as Deepak Chopra advises. Well, it might take a little practice to master the whole self referral gig. Go easy.
That I’ve got to love myself before I can really, honestly love anybody else.
“The object of your practice should first of all be yourself,” says Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Han in True Love. “Your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself.”
I still don’t really. I still don’t really think that I deserve to be loved. I catch glimpses of it, where I know that I deserve, but I’m not quite there yet. Sit through that too.
That being said, I’m starting to learn more about love. Tonight, my two year old Silas learned how to say love. He’s felt it since the moment of his birth, I’m certain. He is love. He is made of love. We all are. But tonight as we wrestled on the couch, and I told him over and over again that I loved him, he repeated it, and then wouldn’t stop saying it. He would throw his meaty arms around my neck and kiss me and say “I luv you dada.” And then he would try it out on his big brother Rio. And then say “Luv you momma. Luv you An[d]y.” There’s a lot of that energy to go around.
I hadn’t really thought of it until a few days ago. I looked at the calendar tonight and saw that it had been four weeks, one full moon, since something so beautiful, so tender, so difficult, passed out of my life.
Maybe forever.
Maybe not.
It has been a very challenging, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes agonizing 28 days. Not just for me. I’m not alone. Another shares this sorrow. But I can only write of my own journey, it’s the only I know. Even though that knowledge is so imperfect.
“What pattern is this teaching you about?” I hear Dan’s voice in my head. It was just this week that he brought me to the brink of tears – likely sobbing tears – in the middle of the Royal Roads Café. Loving bastard.
What patterns?
That my challenge is to stay. My challenge is to stick it out. Leaving would be easier. By no means easy. Just easier. Leaving would mean some short term pain, agony, but it would pass in time, and I could move on. There would be scar tissue. Some things simply don’t heal any more. But in a month, or two, or maybe three, I could move on. That’s my pattern. When the going gets tough, I walk away. I’m choosing to stay this time. As long as I can.
Sometimes the right thing to do is stop. Sometimes, things aren't right and the only thing to do is stop. "Know when to stop," advises Lao Tzu. Fine. Right now doesn't feel like the right time for me to walk.
Patterns....
That I fear fear itself. It is ice water in my veins. Fear closes my heart. Fear is the opposite of love. Fear kills love. I dread the cold hand of fear on my chest, on my throat. When I feel it taking its grip, I do anything I can to not feel it. But I am learning to invite fear in. Instead of running of late, I am learning to “sit through” fear’s icy wash. What’s the worst that can happen?
I guess I could die of fright….Likely not.
That I like quick fixes. I remember one morning receiving an email that released the icy wash of fear through me and before I had finished reading the note, I was reaching for the phone, making it worse. The thought of sitting through my day with the intensely uncomfortable emotions that the note, my own stupidity, and the uncertainty it evoked was unbearable. But my haste to try and fix the problem only made it worse. Lao Tzu advises restraint as one of the three pillars of the Tao te Ching. Step back, he says. Wait. Sit through it.
That uncertainty and vulnerability are also my nemesis’s, and that I seem to attract them into my life.
So what are these patterns teaching me?
I’ve been pretty focused on the notion of self referral of late, and that my attempts at staying completely centred in my own soul, my own spirit has lead me to some pretty sophisticated forms of self loathing. I’m in the middle of one of the most emotionally challenging situations of my life, and I’m beating myself up because I can’t stay detached from its ebbs and flows! One day I’m high as a kite, and the next I’m whale poop, and brow beating myself for not staying “at the centre of the river” as Deepak Chopra advises. Well, it might take a little practice to master the whole self referral gig. Go easy.
That I’ve got to love myself before I can really, honestly love anybody else.
“The object of your practice should first of all be yourself,” says Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Han in True Love. “Your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself.”
I still don’t really. I still don’t really think that I deserve to be loved. I catch glimpses of it, where I know that I deserve, but I’m not quite there yet. Sit through that too.
That being said, I’m starting to learn more about love. Tonight, my two year old Silas learned how to say love. He’s felt it since the moment of his birth, I’m certain. He is love. He is made of love. We all are. But tonight as we wrestled on the couch, and I told him over and over again that I loved him, he repeated it, and then wouldn’t stop saying it. He would throw his meaty arms around my neck and kiss me and say “I luv you dada.” And then he would try it out on his big brother Rio. And then say “Luv you momma. Luv you An[d]y.” There’s a lot of that energy to go around.
(Love manifest)
I’ve always maintained that love is really the only thing in the world that mattered. Now I’m beginning to believe that matter is really nothing but love, as energy, combined with the imprint of information that has existed since the beginning of time, taking shape in the material world.
That means I am love manifest.
I’m good with that.
I’ve learned how deeply I am loved. So many friends. So much joy. So much love. This life, these friends, this love. I am humbled by the mystery.
I’ve learned a lot about joy, and about sorrow in the last 28 days. “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain,” says Kahlil Gibran.
I’m ready to be filled up with joy.
I’ve learned that I can be pretty fucking selfish. I get caught up in my own pain, and forget to consider that someone else is in pain too. It blinds me. It feeds my insecurity.
I’ve learned that I can run from all of these things: sorrow, pain, vulnerability, fear, but that I can’t really. I can run, and fast, and hard, especially when I’m not loving myself as much as I deserve, especially when I want to feel physical pain rather than emotional or spiritual pain. Then I can run for hours, and let the ache in my body, and the numbing flood of endorphins mask the ache in my heart, but its always there the next morning.
I’ve learned that I can, in fact, sit through it.
I’m going to have to continue.
Because I have no idea what’s going to happen next.
And I’ve learned that if I run towards love, and not from fear, that I can run even farther. And that it doesn’t hurt nearly as much.
I’ve learned that it’s a bad idea to drink when I’m feeling pain, or sorrow, or uncertainly, or fear. There’s a pattern there, in my family, and its not a good idea for me to fall into that deep rut. Its a better idea for me to feel the pain, and know that I can endure it, and move past it.
And just yesterday I learned that peace might in fact be the most noble goal I can strive towards. Not for me. But for the woman I love. It may be that more than love, what I can offer her is a chance at peace.
But I don’t know if I can do what might be needed of me in order to allow peace to have a chance. Because there is no guarantee.
Its been 28 days.
One moon.
I am still in love. And often it is bliss. And often it is joy. And often it is very hard, and I don’t do as well as I wish I might when facing my fear, my vulnerability, and the impenetrable frustration or uncertainty. But I’m learning to be gentle with others, and with myself. And I’m learning what true love is.
One moon, come and gone.
Tomorrow is the 29th day.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Sing Along
We three head out on a Friday afternoon for the local video store. Its movie night. Its nearly 6pm so I have the radio on. Rio asks, “put on some music.” I hit the CD button and Michael Franti and Spearhead set the car on funk. “Not that one, the one we were singing to.”
He’s recalling when, a few days ago, we were coming home listening to Jim Cuddy. Over my own singing, and the melodious sound of Cuddy’s crooning, I could hear Rio is singing “Maybe sometime….” I looked in the mirror and was amazed to see him singing at the top of his lungs.
“You know the words,” I asked.
“I just followed along with you.”
He’s heard them many times.
I love the song of the same name off of Cuddy’s The Light that Guides you Home.
“Well its all right now, that was the way we were, but there’s no sense in changing that now…..Well maybe sometime, maybe some time, maybe some time….”
The sun pours through the windows of the car. Silas is content. He watches out the window, and turns to watch his brother. Rio is singing along again. I feel the cold fire wash over me like rain and turn the mirror so I can see his angel face while he sings. I sing too, in bliss, entangled with this child who is more beautiful than the sun.
I used to think my life was supposed to sound like a Blue Rodeo song. You know, peddle steel guitar, when the girl always leaves in the end. Not anymore.
“Well the story will end and we’ll never know just why. There’s never a chance to say goodbye. But maybe sometime, maybe some time, maybe some time…”
He’s getting most of the words, and belting out the chorus. He’s five; he can’t know the kind of sorrow that sleeps behind those words, but he’s heard me sing them a thousand times, and knows what its supposed to sound like.
In time he will. In his life, he will love and lose many times. His heart will grow wise. And hopefully he will never grow so foolish as to fail to love again.
Maybe sometime.
He’s recalling when, a few days ago, we were coming home listening to Jim Cuddy. Over my own singing, and the melodious sound of Cuddy’s crooning, I could hear Rio is singing “Maybe sometime….” I looked in the mirror and was amazed to see him singing at the top of his lungs.
“You know the words,” I asked.
“I just followed along with you.”
He’s heard them many times.
I love the song of the same name off of Cuddy’s The Light that Guides you Home.
“Well its all right now, that was the way we were, but there’s no sense in changing that now…..Well maybe sometime, maybe some time, maybe some time….”
The sun pours through the windows of the car. Silas is content. He watches out the window, and turns to watch his brother. Rio is singing along again. I feel the cold fire wash over me like rain and turn the mirror so I can see his angel face while he sings. I sing too, in bliss, entangled with this child who is more beautiful than the sun.
I used to think my life was supposed to sound like a Blue Rodeo song. You know, peddle steel guitar, when the girl always leaves in the end. Not anymore.
“Well the story will end and we’ll never know just why. There’s never a chance to say goodbye. But maybe sometime, maybe some time, maybe some time…”
He’s getting most of the words, and belting out the chorus. He’s five; he can’t know the kind of sorrow that sleeps behind those words, but he’s heard me sing them a thousand times, and knows what its supposed to sound like.
In time he will. In his life, he will love and lose many times. His heart will grow wise. And hopefully he will never grow so foolish as to fail to love again.
Maybe sometime.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Running Towards Stillness
It’s a welcome sunny day in September, and Josh and I park his car at the Pike Road entrance to East Sooke Park, and then drive mine south to Aylard Farm to start our run. I don’t get nervous at the start of a long run anymore: I know I can do this. I don’t fear the physical discomfort that might come. Instead, I’m exhilarated by the prospect of moving through the coastal landscape at the southern most tip of Vancouver Island on this extraordinary day.
We begin along the path slowly, warming up, falling into a rhythm of conversation, and a easy flow along the gravel path to the beach. We follow along the water’s edge a while, the mid day sunshine gleaming off the swells, the beach strewn with bull kelp. The tide is high, so we scramble up the bank and into the woods and continue along the trail that skirts the water’s edge along some of the most exquisite sea shore on southern Vancouver Island.
The path winds through groves of naked arbutus trees and over rocky outcrops. This is the sort of running where you use your hands a lot, pulling up steep slopes, and dropping down over rocky cliffs. Below us, sometimes a hundred feet or more down sheer cliffs, the surf pounds the exposed southern point of the island, its roar omni-present, filling the space around us with a cacophony of white noise.
We pass Beechey Head, warming up. I can feel my body starting to intuit the trail. Can feel my mind relaxing into the run. Our conversation takes long pauses as we pound up steep sections of the trail that climb high above the sea, where finger inlets poke the rocky bulkheads. Then down again, thick mats of salal. We pass the first clump of black bear dung of the day, itself composed nearly entirely of salal berries, leaves and twigs, most of which have been only minimally digested. The berry crop is so rich that the bears need only draw minimal nutrition from each encouraged bellyful.
Every step forward is a step into joy. Every step forward is a step into bliss.
In the last two or three years, trail running has become the yang component of my body/spirit workout. I’ve been running all of my life, but never like this. I was a skinny kid who was frequently chided for his lack of athletic prowess. In grade four I was on my schools cross country team. I remember a three kilometer race where I placed dead centre of the pack. I didn’t run much through grade school, except through the woods behind my home in Burlington, where second growth maple, pine and beach cast dark pools of cool shadow during the heat of southern Ontario summers. In high school and collage I dated a woman who was a track and field athlete, and she inspired me to run again.
It wasn’t until moving to the Rockies in 1992 that I ran again with any regularity. When I landed at the western edge of the continent two and a half years ago, I replaced Nordic skiing with cross country running as the mainstay of my work out. It brings me to bliss nearly every time I hit a trail.
So now I am a skinny (I prefer slender, svelte, or streamlined) man who can run for hours.
Josh and I race down a long, muddy slope to where the trail crosses a rocky beach and a sheltered cove just south of Cabin Point. From here the trail climbs steeply up through cliffs and a tangled forest again to emerge on a broad, open plateau a few hundred feet above the crashing tide. Its my favorite place on the Coast Trail, a flat expanse of stone and meadow where I can stride out and feel the contentment of a cadence and the flow of land, sea, sky, muscle and heart.
We begin along the path slowly, warming up, falling into a rhythm of conversation, and a easy flow along the gravel path to the beach. We follow along the water’s edge a while, the mid day sunshine gleaming off the swells, the beach strewn with bull kelp. The tide is high, so we scramble up the bank and into the woods and continue along the trail that skirts the water’s edge along some of the most exquisite sea shore on southern Vancouver Island.
The path winds through groves of naked arbutus trees and over rocky outcrops. This is the sort of running where you use your hands a lot, pulling up steep slopes, and dropping down over rocky cliffs. Below us, sometimes a hundred feet or more down sheer cliffs, the surf pounds the exposed southern point of the island, its roar omni-present, filling the space around us with a cacophony of white noise.
We pass Beechey Head, warming up. I can feel my body starting to intuit the trail. Can feel my mind relaxing into the run. Our conversation takes long pauses as we pound up steep sections of the trail that climb high above the sea, where finger inlets poke the rocky bulkheads. Then down again, thick mats of salal. We pass the first clump of black bear dung of the day, itself composed nearly entirely of salal berries, leaves and twigs, most of which have been only minimally digested. The berry crop is so rich that the bears need only draw minimal nutrition from each encouraged bellyful.
Every step forward is a step into joy. Every step forward is a step into bliss.
In the last two or three years, trail running has become the yang component of my body/spirit workout. I’ve been running all of my life, but never like this. I was a skinny kid who was frequently chided for his lack of athletic prowess. In grade four I was on my schools cross country team. I remember a three kilometer race where I placed dead centre of the pack. I didn’t run much through grade school, except through the woods behind my home in Burlington, where second growth maple, pine and beach cast dark pools of cool shadow during the heat of southern Ontario summers. In high school and collage I dated a woman who was a track and field athlete, and she inspired me to run again.
It wasn’t until moving to the Rockies in 1992 that I ran again with any regularity. When I landed at the western edge of the continent two and a half years ago, I replaced Nordic skiing with cross country running as the mainstay of my work out. It brings me to bliss nearly every time I hit a trail.
So now I am a skinny (I prefer slender, svelte, or streamlined) man who can run for hours.
Josh and I race down a long, muddy slope to where the trail crosses a rocky beach and a sheltered cove just south of Cabin Point. From here the trail climbs steeply up through cliffs and a tangled forest again to emerge on a broad, open plateau a few hundred feet above the crashing tide. Its my favorite place on the Coast Trail, a flat expanse of stone and meadow where I can stride out and feel the contentment of a cadence and the flow of land, sea, sky, muscle and heart.
Just a few weeks ago I ran to Cabin Point and back on my own, shaking off a difficult parting from someone I love dearly, and I remember crossing this bench wishing that I was not alone, that she was there to share this miraculous place with me.
Maybe someday. Maybe someday.
Josh and I push ourselves along the trail, feeling the effortless flow that comes at the apex of a run.
I know that soon I’ll touch, however briefly, the stillness that I am seeking in all my efforts.
The yin aspect of my mind/spirit workout is meditation. Every morning I sit for thirty minutes, practicing silence and stillness as best I can. I’m an amateur, and my daily practice is still mostly involves a pattern of inner dialog where memory and prediction emerge; where dreams merge with reality; where sexual fantasy foists itself on the stillness of my body; where fear and vulnerability take an icy grip on the softness of my heart. I’m still practicing tenderness with myself: rather than growing angry or frustrated, I silently say “those are thoughts,” and return to focus on my breathing.
As I have written elsewhere, from time to time I am even jolted from this stillness by an urge to move. To escape my mind. I lurch from my cushion, from the tiny alter, and have to gently remind myself to “sit through” whatever is making me so uncomfortable with stillness.
The urge to run, during these challenging times, is almost overwhelming.
This is where yin and the yang create not opposites playing against one another, but two halves of a whole, becoming one.
When I run, I allow my mind to range over the landscape through which I pass. The technical nature of most of my trails demand sharp focus on my feet or I’d surely trip or fall, in some places almost certainly to my death. But inside of that focus, my mind, and my spirit, are working things out. I let them. I try not to get in the way of my mind, my heart, my soul’s intuitive nature of sort through life’s mysteries.
I run in nature, in part, because in the woods, in the hills and mountains, by the sea shore, I am most able to draw the extraordinary creative abundance of the natural word into me. When I run, I am reminded that I am not separate from the landscape through which I move. I am simply another element of the land moving through a myriad other elements, indistinguishable.
Running awakens my passions, my desires, my vulnerabilities, my creativity. In meditation I touch to the creative void, the field of pure potentiality that exists everywhere around us, and within us, at all times. In meditation I find a stillness where I can allow my soul to touch the place within, and all around me, where this creativity manifests. But as with the Tai Chi -- the swirling black and white symbol taken to represent yin and yang -- in the black there is white, and the white there is black: in stillness, motion, and in motion stillness.
In meditation, my breathing (and my occasional physical reactions to the really hard, and sometimes dark places my soul stumbles upon) are the movement. In running, in particular on long, challenges runs, I inevitably find a place of stillness: I am not a man running through nature, but nature finding a still point from the motion.
And then, without a doubt, that stillness slips away, and is replaced by burning muscles and panting lungs as the trail winds on and on. On this particular day, I am awe struck by the shear magnificence of the coastal landscape. I keep exclaiming to Josh that I “can’t believe I live here!” Its pure delight to pass through this place, this promise, this life.
We finish our trail on the beach at the end of Pike Road and rest in the sun, on a log, watching the waves pound the islets off shore, watch fishing boats navigate the narrow channels, watch the sky grow mottled with cloud and then clear again. Then another short run out Pike Road, and we reach the car after two and a half hours of on the trial and begin the drive back into Victoria.
Every step is a step into mystery. Every moment an opportunity to touch the both stillness and motion, the abundant creative power of life’s love and energy, its joy and its sorrow, its peace and challenge and beauty. I will spend my life running towards stillness, and then, when I’ve finally reached it, simply keep running.
(Josh and I near Cabin Point on a previous Coast Trail run last winter)
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Philosopher Kings at the Royal Roads Cafe
The parking lot is packed as it always is at lunch, and when I step inside the place is jammed with elderly couples having their mid day meal together, and road crews, construction workers and tradesmen tucking into a hearty lunch. That’s the kind of place it is. Its why we like it.
I spot Dan across the room and when I approach we shake hands.
He asks “How are you?” and I only smile and instead ask him how he’s doing.
“Tired,” he says, and I know he’s not complaining. He’s not the type. Its just a statement. “I’ve been getting up at 4am a lot lately. There’s been a lot of energy flowing.” We’re not big on small talk.
I sit down and order tea.
I ask him about the energy. He says that while he doesn’t like to talk about it this sort of thing too much, he thinks that we’re moving through an energy portal.
He must notice my eyebrow shoot up, because he quickly adds that its not about all the astrological, Sagittarius in the fifth-house kind of nonsense (my word) but more about how energy moves through the universe, and that from time to time it becomes much more intense. I beleive that we share a healthy skepticism of things so overtly woo-woo.
Dan says that his personal take is that during these times it can feel very difficult to understand why things are so hard. His belief that its because we’re literally being squeezed through a very small space – energetically – in order to emerge on the other side.
I’m laughing while he explains this. “Does this sound familiar?” he asks. I nod, still laughing, but feeling the uncomfortable lump in my throat catching.
He’s not one to quote the bible all that often he adds, but “its like the eye of the needle. You can’t take anything but your own soul with you when you pass through.”
“So how do you finally move through it?” I want to know. I’m the fixer. I like to fix things, and fast. If there’s a way through the eye, then sign me up.
“You have to surrender,” he says.
“Great,” I mutter, “more fucking surrender.”
OK, talk with me about surrender. Dan offers an analogy from our common work, and explains that it required him to move from “f’ing surrender, to eloquent surrender.”
My read is that eloquent surrender is when you can relax into the process of letting go, of stepping back, to giving up control over outcomes. This is opposed to simply saying “I’ve had enough of this shit. I give up.”
Our lunch comes and we begin to eat. I can see the question in his face. “So, how am I?”
I tell him: Angry. Really angry. Frustrated. Confused. Vulnerable. Feeling sorrow. And sick and fucking tired of it.
He knows without having to ask, of course. We’ve been having lunch together once or twice a month for a year and a half. But he would have known if this was the first time we sat down together. I’m an open book, and Dan is a highly skilled reader.
And for the last few months I have been in a profoundly perplexed, disparaging state about the most basic of human conditions: human love.
I say: “I was thinking about this meeting this morning, and I just couldn’t believe that this is what we were going to talk about again. I’m sick of it. But my work is going great, and while I sometimes feel fear and pain around my loss of my children, this is what’s got me completely, totally stuck. I just don’t know what to do?”
“We get together to work energetically,” he says, smiling. “I'm not a relationship councilor. That’s not my area of expertise. What I am here to do is help you with the flow of energy in your life. To help you get unstuck.”
When I tell people that Dan is my business coach, which he is, I quickly add that we’re don’t sit around and talk about marketing strategies and new client acquisition. We talk about how the world really works. The flow of energy. And we both agree that energy is really just love that has yet to manifest in the world.
A elderly couple takes a table behind us and I watch them order a late breakfast off the menu. The conversation is one sided. I can feel the woman reaching out to her husband, but he’s not really there any longer.
I explain to Dan that my greatest fear, the thing that gives me more pain than almost anything else is uncertainty, the unknown. Not knowing.
The mystery.
I know that every moment is a step into mystery. But this morning, when I woke from a wine and melatonin induced sleep, actually writhing in pain – this was a very new experience for me – as a result of too large a leap into mystery, I knew that something had to change. I just don’t know what, or how.
He feels my frustration. Actually feels it.
He challenges me: “Step into that frustration.”
I smirk.
“No, really step into it. Feel it. Right now."
“More,” he says.
I take away a layer of protection. My throat constricts.
“More,” he gently pulls me.
I slip further into the sorrow. I can feel my eyes getting wet and back off.
“Step back into it,” he urges.
I let the layers of protection slip a little. I feel heat in my chest, my throat tight, my face flush.
“Now ask yourself, what pattern is this teaching you about?”
I let that question sit a moment, the sound of the room distant.
“Ok,” he says.
I pick up my water and drink, but not because I’m thirsty. I’m just not interested in having a complete breakdown in the middle of the lunch rush.
“I didn’t hear any voices telling me what the patterns were,” I explain.
“When you feel that frustration, that pain, ask that question.”
I tell Dan that I have been thinking about my habitual nature to flee from pain, from sorrow, from difficultly. That’s a pattern. The hardest thing to do is sit with it. To sit through it. Some mornings, I tell him, when I meditate, my body literally lurches to get away, out of the empty room suddenly filled with swirling voices, with stories, with memories, with predictions. I lurch and open my eyes and want to run. To run from myself. And then I remind myself, “sit through this. There is nowhere else to go.”
The lunch crowd is starting to thin out.
“Why am I feeling this way?” I ask him. “Why are things so damn hard?”
And don’t tell me about the portal, I’m thinking.
“You tell me.” Old coaching trick.
I sit with the question for a moment. A word came to me this morning during a pre-dawn walk. “Its penance,” I tell him. It’s a funny choice of words for a non-catholic. I’ve been saying that my Karma is to tell my story, so as to wash myself off the mistakes I’ve made in the past. But penance?
“Because you’ve been a bad boy?” he smiles.
I nod. I can’t speak.
He tells me the story of a friend who has died, and who spent much of their life serving others but not taking care of themselves. Ignoring warning signs of illness. “What do you need to do to take care of yourself right now?” he asks.
The conversation swirls around answers to that question while the waitress clears the table. We order pie. It’s a good self care practice.
I remind Dan about my reading Deepak Chopra’s books over the last year, and my attempts to apply the concept of self referral over object referral in my life. “I find that I am getting angry with myself that I can’t detach from what is undoubtedly the hardest emotional situation that I’ve ever been in.”
He laughs. Dan has worked with Deepak in the past. “If Deepak was here he’d say, ‘that’s not what I wrote the book for!’”
“I know. I should try to practice self referral with my cell phone to start, or maybe with a contract that I hope to win, and go easy on myself with the big stuff.”
“You’re discovering new, sophisticated levels of self loathing,” he says, still smiling. “That’s not the purpose of practicing self referral.”
We talk about the emptiness that is sure to come when I step into the unknown space that is before me. “Remember” he says, “the void was misnamed. It may seem empty, but it is the potentiality field.”
The field of pure potentiality. Where all creation manifests.
I'm going to have to get comfortable with that void to move through this.
“Its easiest when I stay focused in the moment,” I say.
“That’s good, because the future doesn’t exist. Tomorrow doesn’t exist. Next week doesn’t exist.”
I share that recently I watched the movie Peaceful Warrior, which is based on the book The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. When I first read that book twenty years ago, I loved it, and credit it in part with my transformation from a skinny kid who couldn’t run to the street corner, to a skinny man who can run for hours up hills and along rough coastal or mountain trails.
The final scene in the movie is beautiful: Millman is on the rings competing for the first time after a terrible accident, and he can hear his mentor Socrates’ voice asking questions in his head, which Millman answers:
What time is it?
Now.
Where are you?
Right here.
Who are you?
This moment.
* * *
The sun is out when our lunch ends and Dan and I part ways in the parking lot. I head to Thetis Lake for a run. I ran yesterday, and its rare for me to want to run two days in a row, but I feel as though I need to imprint our time together on my body, and I know of no better way than a run in the hills to do that. The afternoon is warm, and I pad softly up the Lewis J. Clark trail to the summit of a ridge above the lake, mulling what Dan and I discussed, and my rocky path forward.
I’m going to need to be This Moment to make it through. I’m going to need to be kind to myself, to be loving with myself. I run slowly, easily through the giant Douglas Fir and down towards the lake, striding into my sorrow, my fear, my frustration, holding unconditional love in my heart, asking it all to reveal its patterns so I can squeeze through the eye of a needle.
I spot Dan across the room and when I approach we shake hands.
He asks “How are you?” and I only smile and instead ask him how he’s doing.
“Tired,” he says, and I know he’s not complaining. He’s not the type. Its just a statement. “I’ve been getting up at 4am a lot lately. There’s been a lot of energy flowing.” We’re not big on small talk.
I sit down and order tea.
I ask him about the energy. He says that while he doesn’t like to talk about it this sort of thing too much, he thinks that we’re moving through an energy portal.
He must notice my eyebrow shoot up, because he quickly adds that its not about all the astrological, Sagittarius in the fifth-house kind of nonsense (my word) but more about how energy moves through the universe, and that from time to time it becomes much more intense. I beleive that we share a healthy skepticism of things so overtly woo-woo.
Dan says that his personal take is that during these times it can feel very difficult to understand why things are so hard. His belief that its because we’re literally being squeezed through a very small space – energetically – in order to emerge on the other side.
I’m laughing while he explains this. “Does this sound familiar?” he asks. I nod, still laughing, but feeling the uncomfortable lump in my throat catching.
He’s not one to quote the bible all that often he adds, but “its like the eye of the needle. You can’t take anything but your own soul with you when you pass through.”
“So how do you finally move through it?” I want to know. I’m the fixer. I like to fix things, and fast. If there’s a way through the eye, then sign me up.
“You have to surrender,” he says.
“Great,” I mutter, “more fucking surrender.”
OK, talk with me about surrender. Dan offers an analogy from our common work, and explains that it required him to move from “f’ing surrender, to eloquent surrender.”
My read is that eloquent surrender is when you can relax into the process of letting go, of stepping back, to giving up control over outcomes. This is opposed to simply saying “I’ve had enough of this shit. I give up.”
Our lunch comes and we begin to eat. I can see the question in his face. “So, how am I?”
I tell him: Angry. Really angry. Frustrated. Confused. Vulnerable. Feeling sorrow. And sick and fucking tired of it.
He knows without having to ask, of course. We’ve been having lunch together once or twice a month for a year and a half. But he would have known if this was the first time we sat down together. I’m an open book, and Dan is a highly skilled reader.
And for the last few months I have been in a profoundly perplexed, disparaging state about the most basic of human conditions: human love.
I say: “I was thinking about this meeting this morning, and I just couldn’t believe that this is what we were going to talk about again. I’m sick of it. But my work is going great, and while I sometimes feel fear and pain around my loss of my children, this is what’s got me completely, totally stuck. I just don’t know what to do?”
“We get together to work energetically,” he says, smiling. “I'm not a relationship councilor. That’s not my area of expertise. What I am here to do is help you with the flow of energy in your life. To help you get unstuck.”
When I tell people that Dan is my business coach, which he is, I quickly add that we’re don’t sit around and talk about marketing strategies and new client acquisition. We talk about how the world really works. The flow of energy. And we both agree that energy is really just love that has yet to manifest in the world.
A elderly couple takes a table behind us and I watch them order a late breakfast off the menu. The conversation is one sided. I can feel the woman reaching out to her husband, but he’s not really there any longer.
I explain to Dan that my greatest fear, the thing that gives me more pain than almost anything else is uncertainty, the unknown. Not knowing.
The mystery.
I know that every moment is a step into mystery. But this morning, when I woke from a wine and melatonin induced sleep, actually writhing in pain – this was a very new experience for me – as a result of too large a leap into mystery, I knew that something had to change. I just don’t know what, or how.
He feels my frustration. Actually feels it.
He challenges me: “Step into that frustration.”
I smirk.
“No, really step into it. Feel it. Right now."
“More,” he says.
I take away a layer of protection. My throat constricts.
“More,” he gently pulls me.
I slip further into the sorrow. I can feel my eyes getting wet and back off.
“Step back into it,” he urges.
I let the layers of protection slip a little. I feel heat in my chest, my throat tight, my face flush.
“Now ask yourself, what pattern is this teaching you about?”
I let that question sit a moment, the sound of the room distant.
“Ok,” he says.
I pick up my water and drink, but not because I’m thirsty. I’m just not interested in having a complete breakdown in the middle of the lunch rush.
“I didn’t hear any voices telling me what the patterns were,” I explain.
“When you feel that frustration, that pain, ask that question.”
I tell Dan that I have been thinking about my habitual nature to flee from pain, from sorrow, from difficultly. That’s a pattern. The hardest thing to do is sit with it. To sit through it. Some mornings, I tell him, when I meditate, my body literally lurches to get away, out of the empty room suddenly filled with swirling voices, with stories, with memories, with predictions. I lurch and open my eyes and want to run. To run from myself. And then I remind myself, “sit through this. There is nowhere else to go.”
The lunch crowd is starting to thin out.
“Why am I feeling this way?” I ask him. “Why are things so damn hard?”
And don’t tell me about the portal, I’m thinking.
“You tell me.” Old coaching trick.
I sit with the question for a moment. A word came to me this morning during a pre-dawn walk. “Its penance,” I tell him. It’s a funny choice of words for a non-catholic. I’ve been saying that my Karma is to tell my story, so as to wash myself off the mistakes I’ve made in the past. But penance?
“Because you’ve been a bad boy?” he smiles.
I nod. I can’t speak.
He tells me the story of a friend who has died, and who spent much of their life serving others but not taking care of themselves. Ignoring warning signs of illness. “What do you need to do to take care of yourself right now?” he asks.
The conversation swirls around answers to that question while the waitress clears the table. We order pie. It’s a good self care practice.
I remind Dan about my reading Deepak Chopra’s books over the last year, and my attempts to apply the concept of self referral over object referral in my life. “I find that I am getting angry with myself that I can’t detach from what is undoubtedly the hardest emotional situation that I’ve ever been in.”
He laughs. Dan has worked with Deepak in the past. “If Deepak was here he’d say, ‘that’s not what I wrote the book for!’”
“I know. I should try to practice self referral with my cell phone to start, or maybe with a contract that I hope to win, and go easy on myself with the big stuff.”
“You’re discovering new, sophisticated levels of self loathing,” he says, still smiling. “That’s not the purpose of practicing self referral.”
We talk about the emptiness that is sure to come when I step into the unknown space that is before me. “Remember” he says, “the void was misnamed. It may seem empty, but it is the potentiality field.”
The field of pure potentiality. Where all creation manifests.
I'm going to have to get comfortable with that void to move through this.
“Its easiest when I stay focused in the moment,” I say.
“That’s good, because the future doesn’t exist. Tomorrow doesn’t exist. Next week doesn’t exist.”
I share that recently I watched the movie Peaceful Warrior, which is based on the book The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. When I first read that book twenty years ago, I loved it, and credit it in part with my transformation from a skinny kid who couldn’t run to the street corner, to a skinny man who can run for hours up hills and along rough coastal or mountain trails.
The final scene in the movie is beautiful: Millman is on the rings competing for the first time after a terrible accident, and he can hear his mentor Socrates’ voice asking questions in his head, which Millman answers:
What time is it?
Now.
Where are you?
Right here.
Who are you?
This moment.
* * *
The sun is out when our lunch ends and Dan and I part ways in the parking lot. I head to Thetis Lake for a run. I ran yesterday, and its rare for me to want to run two days in a row, but I feel as though I need to imprint our time together on my body, and I know of no better way than a run in the hills to do that. The afternoon is warm, and I pad softly up the Lewis J. Clark trail to the summit of a ridge above the lake, mulling what Dan and I discussed, and my rocky path forward.
I’m going to need to be This Moment to make it through. I’m going to need to be kind to myself, to be loving with myself. I run slowly, easily through the giant Douglas Fir and down towards the lake, striding into my sorrow, my fear, my frustration, holding unconditional love in my heart, asking it all to reveal its patterns so I can squeeze through the eye of a needle.
Friday, October 05, 2007
Sheep River, Alberta
The Sheep River in Alberta is a favourite place at any time of the year for me. But in the autumn, I'd like nothing more than to be sleeping beneigth golden aspens, a blanket of stars overhead, a fire casting a warm glow over a loving smile, looking back at me.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Stepping into Fear
For a short spell last winter I studied Aikido again. It had been some time since I’d practiced the martial art, the last time being when I was in college. Then, my teacher had been a brown-belt who had come to Aikido from a life of juvenile delinquency and street fighting. We learned how to fend off multiple attackers, disarm knife wielding thugs, and I felt pretty sure I could break just about anybody’s elbow or knee if the need arose.
My teacher last winter was a black-belt who taught us to work with our own energy, and the energy of an opponent, to ensure that nobody in a conflict got hurt. One of the most powerful lessons that I took from that experience was to step into, not away from, an attack.
To step into, not away from, fear.
While studying Tai Kwon Do, again some years ago now, I was taught many defensive moves to fend off flying hands and feet. Step back, block, step back, block, block, counter-strike. Each movement was away from the attacker, until we were in position to land a punch or kick. Now, I was being taught to get in close to the attacker. To step into the knife swinging towards my gut, or the pipe being swung at my head. Step into it, so that you can direct where it goes.
Thus it is with fear.
This morning I rise and feel the angry knot of fear in my chest. I’m disappointed in myself for feeling this: only hours ago I declared myself free from fear! Now, I’m at its mercy again.
My first instinct is to run from it. What can I do to avoid my fear? I busy myself, drink tea, shave, shower. Fold laundry. Do the dishes. Try to zero in on writing, on work. I could do push ups. Chin ups. Tidy up the boyz room.
But fear follows me, no matter how many times I step back and try to block, block, and counter strike.
Instead I step into it.
I sit. Close my eyes. Feel it. Breathe through it.
Its hard. Sometimes when I meditate and allow the emotion, the feelings, the pain or the fear to simply rise and fall, I am jarred from my silence and begin to stand. My body craves movement. To get away. To move away from what I am feeling. Where am I going to go, I ask, that I won’t have to face you?
So instead, I take a deep breath and invite my fear in. I say to myself, “Sit through this. Sit through this.”
I know this morning that I’m not able to direct it, as I would like. All I can do is acknowledge it, greet it, and allow it to cool as I give it the space it needs to teach me what it must. Whatever that might be.
It helps. Not always as much as I would like, but it always helps. Its just an emotion. A response. Its almost always about some story that I’ve made up to explain the unknown. I don’t know what is happening, so I create a story, and get attached to it. Meditation helps to unravel the story. It helps unravel all the stories that I make up about the people I love, about my own life.
My teacher last winter was a black-belt who taught us to work with our own energy, and the energy of an opponent, to ensure that nobody in a conflict got hurt. One of the most powerful lessons that I took from that experience was to step into, not away from, an attack.
To step into, not away from, fear.
While studying Tai Kwon Do, again some years ago now, I was taught many defensive moves to fend off flying hands and feet. Step back, block, step back, block, block, counter-strike. Each movement was away from the attacker, until we were in position to land a punch or kick. Now, I was being taught to get in close to the attacker. To step into the knife swinging towards my gut, or the pipe being swung at my head. Step into it, so that you can direct where it goes.
Thus it is with fear.
This morning I rise and feel the angry knot of fear in my chest. I’m disappointed in myself for feeling this: only hours ago I declared myself free from fear! Now, I’m at its mercy again.
My first instinct is to run from it. What can I do to avoid my fear? I busy myself, drink tea, shave, shower. Fold laundry. Do the dishes. Try to zero in on writing, on work. I could do push ups. Chin ups. Tidy up the boyz room.
But fear follows me, no matter how many times I step back and try to block, block, and counter strike.
Instead I step into it.
I sit. Close my eyes. Feel it. Breathe through it.
Its hard. Sometimes when I meditate and allow the emotion, the feelings, the pain or the fear to simply rise and fall, I am jarred from my silence and begin to stand. My body craves movement. To get away. To move away from what I am feeling. Where am I going to go, I ask, that I won’t have to face you?
So instead, I take a deep breath and invite my fear in. I say to myself, “Sit through this. Sit through this.”
I know this morning that I’m not able to direct it, as I would like. All I can do is acknowledge it, greet it, and allow it to cool as I give it the space it needs to teach me what it must. Whatever that might be.
It helps. Not always as much as I would like, but it always helps. Its just an emotion. A response. Its almost always about some story that I’ve made up to explain the unknown. I don’t know what is happening, so I create a story, and get attached to it. Meditation helps to unravel the story. It helps unravel all the stories that I make up about the people I love, about my own life.
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