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.