January 4, 2007

WHAT IS LOVE?

Love is a great wonder and mystery to which we are inexorably drawn; we may have our head aimed down in troughs, spiritual and otherwise, of promised satisfaction, and there we may feed and make do for a while, but eventually we look up, with dissatisfaction running down our chins and disappointment wringing out our spine, and once again reach out for love, reaching with less and less hesitation, slowly but surely becoming pure reaching, and finally being that for which we are reaching.

Love calls us, at first by our given name, then by our true name, and finally through all that is. It’s an invitation that will not disappear. Love calls us home, not caring how long we have wandered, nor how long we have forgotten, nor how long our list of flaws. Nothing satisfies like love. As it truly is, it has no end, no bounds; it is without limitation. And it is also right here, less than a breath away, awaiting our undressed attention and longing for genuine connection.

Love may include attraction, but is more than attraction; love may include appetite, but is more than appetite; love may include kindness, but is more than kindness; and so on.
Eros, philos, agape; love of food, love of sports, love of ideas, love of erotic play, love of God, love beyond love; puppy-dog love, fanatic love, unrequited love, ecstatic love, sacrificial love, down-in-the-dirt love and love sublime; so many facets and faces of love, so many forms and ways of loving, experientially so palpably obvious and definitionally so hard to corral, let alone pin down (probably because love eludes all of its definitions, including those given here).

Love outrocks everything else. There is no real escape from it. Love is the deepest freedom, no matter how dense its chains. Love simultaneously binds and liberates. It is absolutely intimate with paradox, even as it outbreathes and outdances it. Love is the state and practice of expansively felt, openly caring communion, whether with one or many or all that is. And love is self-illuminating, life-affirming embrace, the heartbeat of real intimacy, the gratitude-suffused intuition of everywhere-present Divinity. I cannot say enough about love, but I will, of course, try.

Love is fundamentally just Absolute Mystery nakedly embracing Itself; the personalizing of this is the essence of relationship. Relationships easily get stuck and lost in the melodramatics of intimate intersubjectivity, but it is nonetheless possible for a relationship to reach sufficient transparency, spiritual and otherwise, so as to touch what’s beyond it through full-blooded, deeply committed participation in it. Liberation through intimacy. And how? By loving so strongly, so intensely, so fully, especially when things are really difficult, that we cease turning away from that in us (and others) which we usually shun, ostracize, or disown. Love, deep love, doesn’t exclude, however fiercely it might deal with certain situations. Ever dying into it are we, like broken waves in endless ocean. Dying into the deepest love of all, we live as never before.

When our heart breaks and we don’t go to pieces, and don’t get bitter and twisted, we are in love’s neighborhood. When we give what we most want to be given, we are on love’s doorstep. When we really get that what we do to another, we do to ourselves, we are in love’s living room. When we include in the circle of our reach all that we are, we are in love’s crucible. When we are in love’s fire, and surrender to it, making good use of both the heat and the light therein, we are zeroing in on What-Really-Matters, deepening our capacity to literally be love. Home is where the heart forever is.

At a personal level, love is the openly felt state of embracing and compassionately resonating with another’s being. When this is attempted through the abandoning of personal boundaries, however, love is all but gone, obscured by the resulting fusion (soon to be confusion) that commonly characterizes conventional romance. On the other hand, when our boundaries are not abandoned, but are instead expanded to include the other, we make possible a very deep love. When such love’s exceptionally rich bonding coexists with a naturally succulent, effortlessly mutual erotic chemistry, we can say that we’re not just loving, but are in love, falling/rising/being in love. In the presence of such deep communion (the truly shared heart and shared being and shared karma), there’s no need to romanticize, fantasize, or otherwise restrict love.

When fantasy-centered sexual anticipation or excitation gets an emotionally compelling grip on us, and when we mistake fusion with communion, conventional romance occurs. It features swooning idealism, deliciously intoxicating sensation, and runaway hope, a hope hopelessly enthused about union, true love, and profoundly intimate possibilities (all of which do, of course, occur in mature relationships), a hope nourished and sustained by the dissolution of boundaries. A sweetly narcotic spell of dramatic delusion...

In conventional romance — the separative swoon of false oneness — boundaries are not expanded, so as to include the other, but are collapsed, abandoned, forgotten. Eventually, as the passion loses some intensity and doubts creep in and the dream’s fabric thins, the lovers start wondering where they went wrong, not seeing that what isn’t working in the relationship has been there all along, obscured by the heat of their embrace and the giddy intensity of their fusion. They were but getting it on under artificial light, blindly merging where sensation and idealism meet, abandoning their boundaries instead of stretching them.

Nevertheless, even though many of us recognize the folly of such romance, we still tend to support it, acting as if it’s still a lovely thing, an essential part of love, when in fact it is not love at all, but only perfumed delusion, marketing and inhabiting a pleasurably consoling dream in which sentimentalized eroticism is mistaken for love, and undiscerning certainty for truth.

And, you may ask, how do we know when we’re in the grip of conventional romance? We feel swoony, off balance, intoxicated, erotically stoned, marooned from our critical faculties, and unquestioningly immerse ourselves in our cult of two, our seemingly perfect little bubble of immunity, happily unaware of the rude pricks of reality that our very situation is attracting. It’s a delicious dream, happily feverish and often laced with mystical elements (like boundary dissolution and blissfulness), and therefore not so easy to wake up from, but wake up from it we must, if we are to find and live in real love, the kind of love that makes possible a truly intimate connectedness with both Beloved and beloved.

And how to open yourself more deeply to love? Practice opening in circumstances that typically would shut you down; practice being grateful when you don’t give a damn about being grateful; practice being caring toward yourself when you are beating yourself up for something; practice being caring in the midst of your anger, without, however, shutting it down; practice being compassionate toward yourself when your heart is shut; get into a relationship with another who has a similar commitment to such work, so that your relationship becomes a crucible for Awakening’s alchemy; and don’t forget to cut yourself some slack in all this, for it’s far from a straightforward path, with an abundance of dips and twists and surprises.

At first we reach for love; then we love, until we can do so even when we are not being loved; and last, we are love.

January 8, 2007

GETTING IN TOUCH THROUGH TOUCH


Just finished a training practicum, in which I was teaching how to integrate bodywork with psychotherapy in an intuitively integral context. There were 10 trainees, plus Diane and myself, in a room with 5 foam mats for bodywork and two large windows through which could be seen an undulating wonderland of waist-high snow. Directly below our room flowed a river between whiter-than-white banks, more often than not receiving a steady snowfall. Needless to say, we were so isolated that there were no restrictions on sound -- truly a magical setting for some very deep work.

There were times that our room felt like a madhouse, a wildly healing madhouse, with intense rage, sobbing, and laughter flowing in and out of each other. Catharsis was not necessarily the goal, but it did occur, sometimes volcanically, sometimes tenderly, and almost always in context -- meaning that whatever releases and openings which were occurring were connected, right at the time, with specific events and/or people in that person’s life.

As loud and fiery fierce as it sometimes got, there was an ongoing sense of deep safety and equally deep caring, which made room for an unusually deep vulnerability. This was the fourth meeting for this particular group (as part of their one-year training with me in the art of integral psychotherapy), and their love and appreciation for each other was very evident, whether it took expression through humor, tears, challenges, or vulnerable revelation. There was such a finely nuanced mutuality of attunement that even the slightest shift in something -- like the misreading of a single word in my teaching material (“organismic” being a particular favorite) -- would generate an instantaneous response, hilarious and otherwise.

What made this all especially rewarding for me was that I was both in teaching mode -- helping out as I circulated from dyad (one as the client, the other as the therapist) to dyad -- and could also directly work when needed, often in very short bursts. I would sit with a dyad, tune into what was occurring, feeling the state of both the therapist and the client, perhaps leaving after a suggestion or two, or staying for a bit longer and steering the work in a more fruitful direction. This was more organic flow than deliberate teaching transmission. And the trainees were not just practicing on each other, but were involved in real work with each other. I had said in my advertisement for the training that it would blend deep work on oneself and equally deep work with others (in personal, social, and spiritual contexts), and this was so.

The trainees, all of whom I felt (and feel) great affection for, took on the challenge of doing bodywork while simultaneously counselling -- mixing touch and therapeutic dialogue and direction, along with emotional opening -- without having a preset map of how to precede. My emphasis was on being intuitive, which was both an invitation and an opportunity to let whatever doubts were there to surface. Such doubts, when worked with, cleared the skies so that intuition could be more easily heard and accessed. And the more embodied everyone became, the easier this was.

The bodywork was not primarily taught in a technical way (though there were a few specific areas that trainees were taught to precisely find and work with), but rather was allowed to evolve through the therapist literally being in (and remaining in) touch with the client, no matter what arose. Boundaries were, of course, attuned to and respected, and care was taken to make the client’s needs priority -- rather than the therapist’s agenda for what should or should not happen -- but the overall feeling was less that of a psychology class getting some hands-on clinical work, and more that of shamanism.

I don’t mean “shamanism” in some romantically regressive sense, wherein one’s trying to behave shamanically -- that is, operating from behind a preset methodology -- but in a much deeper sense, wherein one is intuitively calling back home all of the disparate or scattered elements of self, calling them back so that they might be integrated, thereby leaving us whole, together, truly connected, with all of our previously disconnected or disowned aspects of self now working together, in the service of What-Really-Matters.

This was not done intellectually only, and nor ritualistically, but rather intuitively. What guided the therapist was not a map or predetermined methodology, but the energies -- physical, emotional, and otherwise -- of the client. This required that the therapist get more intimate with conscious “not-knowing” -- which is not ignorance, stupidity, or strategic separation from thought, but rather the knowledgeless knowingness, or knowledge-transcending recognition, to which we all have access when our mind’s chatter recedes into the background, and we start to really listen. Knowledge is not wisdom, but it can serve wisdom. My trainees didn’t always know what to do, but when they chose to enter their “not-knowing” and entered it with their undivided attention, various intentions would spontaneously emerge, some of which were intuitively recognized as worth following. .

Following is some of the teaching material from the training (which we’d read together and discuss during breaks in the work):

The primary medium through which contact is maintained in bodywork is sensation. The direction that bodywork takes has much to do with closely attending to changes -- in texture, intensity, directionality, temperature, tension, and so on -- in sensation, as registered primarily by our hands. We are still using our eyes and ears, but we are doing most of our seeing and hearing through our hands.

Bodywork has its own language, possessing a grammar just as sophisticated as that of cognitive work. All we need do is attune ourselves to it. This may seem foreign to us, but actually is far more natural to us than we might think, for the first language we knew and practiced was that of feeling, particularly through touch. Of course, what we heard and saw also touched us. We not only hear sound, but are touched by it; the same with sight. We talk of being in touch, even when we are far apart, for touch to us usually means direct, palpably close contact or connection. There’s also an built-in sensitivity implicit in the notion of touch -- hence the label “touchy” for oversensitivity. We may talk glibly of “touching base”, but the preconceptual roots of this phrase suggest an organismic grounding that is more home to us than we might think.

Getting in touch with our capacity to know ourselves and others through actual touch is a practice that comes naturally to us when we cease letting mind-centered subjectivity center us. Bodywork, especially in its intuitive forms, is about being body-centered, body-sensitive, body-awake. It is also about treating the body not as a housing project within which the real us dwells, but rather as an expression of the real us. This means getting past the notion that we are in our body. It also means not treating our body as an “it”.

Bodywork is at its best when we experience others’ physicality not just as something solid, but as an energetic world-unto-itself. In allowing this, you may see, to take but one example, that your hand is atop their belly, but you will feel as though your hand and their belly are not only more than just a hand and a belly, but also are intermeshed, their conventional form dissolving into something that feels deeper, more authentic, closer to the Real.

How can we let our touch bring us more into touch with dimensions of being through which healing work is inevitable? First of all, be present in your touch. Let your hands be as awake as your heart, right to your fingertips (which may be subtly pulsing with your heartbeat). Do not let cognition or emotion separate you from remaining aware of sensation. Second, bring more attention to the energetic feeling of the contact you are making -- tune into yourself as sentient energy, opening yourself to the feeling of Being. Third, notice whatever flow is occurring, feeling its ripples as well as its surges, letting it both hold and guide you. All this is about becoming more intimate with what is happening. Your hand may not have moved at all, but you will feel movement in it, through it, from it, toward it, all of which provide you with directional clues.

Even now, listen to whatever sensations are occurring. (If possible, have someone close to you read the rest of this paragraph and the following paragraph, while you sit or lie down with your eyes closed.) Close your eyes. Listen more closely. What do you hear? What is being transmitted to you? Through you? Open to the openness that is within and all around you, as always. Let it touch you in your most hidden places. Let it penetrate you. Soften even more. What does your body feel like now? What is its shape? Its texture? If you let go of your body-image, what do you still see in its place? What is at the center of your body? Where are you in your body? How do you differ from your body? What is doing the breathing? Put your hand over your heart: Is your hand touching your chest, or is your chest touching your hand?

Listen more closely. Soften more. Feel the movement of your breath, sensing all the tiny movements within the bigger movement. Relax your jaw muscles, your tongue, your forehead, your scalp. Open to the openness that is within and all around you. Keep softening. Let inside and outside be lovers. If you were to touch another now, what would it be like? Imagine another touching you now. Where would you most like to be touched now? Imagine being touched there now, by a hand alive with presence and love. Let that contact, that touch sink in, let it in all the way. Meeting it with awareness. Blend with it. Open your eyes. Touch the room with your gaze. Look as though your self-consciousness has gone, leaving only consciousness of Being. When you touch others from this place, you cannot help but be of real service to them.

Bodywork with this quality and depth of contact is not only an adjunct to counselling, but serves the very core of it. Such bodywork is intuitive, integral, open-eyed, creative, liberating. When it unfolds in fitting rhythm with counselling savvy and spiritual deepening practices, optimal work occurs. This is therapy at its best, catalyzing a healing that benefits one and all.

January 14, 2007

BILL THE BUTCHER & POST-EXCELLENCE MASTERY


The opening battle scene of Gangs of New York always gets me (though not nearly as much as the closing one in The Last of the Mohicans), even though its violence isn’t really all that graphic. The fight, between two rival gangs, occurs shortly before the Civil War; there are no guns, but just clubs, swords, hatchets, cleavers, knives, knives, and more knives. The sinking of steel into flesh is shown in cutaway flashes, at once surreal and fleshily gripping. The leader of the so-called Natives (those born in the United States) is William Cutting, aka Bill the Butcher, played with compelling virtuosity by Daniel Day-Lewis.

Imagine a dandy with a twirled mustache, colorful vest, stovepipe top-hat, one steely blue glass eye (the original having been removed by himself after he looked away from a man who’d beaten him but left him to live), bloody butcher implements in hand, and a viciously twinkling disdain for those not born in the United States. That’s Bill the Butcher, a man at once monstrous and oddly human, wielding his power with wicked ease and explosive elegance. We may abhor what he stands for, but we also have a hard time not looking at him, no matter what kind of scene he is in.

Not so long ago, I rewatched My Left Foot, featuring another remarkable performance by Day-Lewis. I love watching anyone at the top of their game, and he’s right up there, with his performances on par with Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull, Dustin Hoffman in Rainman, Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, Ed Harris in The Hours, Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, Al Pacino in Scarface, and at least a half dozen or so others that I can’t think of right now.

Years ago I used to watch Chicago Bulls games on television whenever I could, simply because I loved watching Michael Jordan play. He wasn’t always on, sometimes playing badly, but more often than not he pulled it together most games, especially in the last quarter. Then it wasn’t just basketball to me, but something far more, an astonishingly consistent digging deep to rise up in the face of considerable challenge, and not just with pigheaded resolve, but rather a ferocious elegance and exultation, razor-sharp yet also panoramic awareness, and a very rare intensity of will. Jordan would, to put it mildly, literally take over the game. Everyone knew it was coming, but that made no difference. Usually television would, if I watched it for more than half an hour, drain me, but after watching a Bulls game with Jordan starring, I’d be energized.

Watching golf on television is, for me, akin to watching curling on television -- an utter waste of my time -- unless Tiger Woods is playing. I have in the last few years watched the final round of a few golf tournaments simply because he was in the hunt, even when he wasn’t playing so well. In his own way, he was, and is, as explosive as Jordan. I have felt similarly watching Roger Federer dominate men’s tennis over the past few years. His fluid ease and virtuosity, however low-key, moves me, though not quite as much as Jordan and Woods. Their excellence is all the more remarkable for how it is sustained. Others have had absolutely stunning moments: Vince Carter at the 2000 NBA Slam-Dunk Contest, Bob Beamon’s long jump at the 1968 Olympics, Michael Johnson’s 200 meter run at the 1996 Olympics, and so on; but these are incandescent moments, lighting up the sky for a few seconds. Jordan and Woods, by contrast, kept things ablaze for entire seasons.

I feel somewhat the same about Day-Lewis, in his sustaining a series of remarkable and very different roles (perhaps only Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson, Nicole Kidman, and a few others can claim a similar achievement -- and I have to also add Russell Crowe, who was upset in a dream I had last night that I had left him out). In his director’s commentary for Gangs of New York, Martin Scorcese says that Day-Lewis so got into the role of Bill the Butcher that he remained in it even when far from the filming. When ad-libs happened, it wasn’t Daniel doing it, but Bill. He didn’t have to lose 80 pounds (like Christian Bale for his role in The Machinist) or do something correspondingly extreme, but simply give himself so fully and so skillfully to his role that he literally was it, shifting from acting to being.

Excellence? Yes, but more than that, more than a great performance. I’d prefer to call it, whether it arises in acting, basketball, golf, tennis, or any other endeavor, quality of the highest quality, an eloquent embodiment of what’s far beyond what one is doing in the very midst of what one is doing. Day-Lewis, Jordan, and Woods don’t just rock; they do what they’re doing with such consummate skill and passion and edgy brilliance that they are what they are doing. It’s about mastery, but not just mastery; one singer can hit all the right notes, but not move me, and another can hit the same notes, and really move me. The difference? Intensity of soul-presence is one way to put it. When I watch and hear a Jimi Hendrix or David Gilmore or Buddy Guy guitar solo, I shiver; a thrill runs through me, electric and wild. I can hear someone else do a very similar solo, and I don’t shiver, don’t get gooseflesh, don’t get moved to tears -- because that extra infusion is simply not there for me.

I just remembered that I began this blog with The Gangs of New York, but have no idea how to bring that into where this blog has wandered. Perhaps I don’t need to; it seems to have a life of its own, and shows no signs of feeling any obligation to neatly tie together its various elements, even if that were possible.

Some new tangents are now hollering for my attention. Take but one -- a remembering of great desserts I’ve recently had -- and give it a bit of attention, and there’s no turning back. An upside-down caramelized apple pastry in a French restaurant, juicily hot and fragrant, with fresh whipping cream, blows open my salivary glands, winning me over in a matter of seconds, as the rest of the universe quickly recedes. More excellence. Maybe we should just pull up our cozy chairs, pick up our late-night dessert, and enjoy the show, whether it’s sports highlights or comedy or a movie with some sublime acting...

January 16, 2007

SELF-REFLECTION & IDIOT RESPONSIBILITY


Self-reflection is not always what it purports to be. First of all, so much depends on who or what is actually doing the reflecting or introspecting -- for example, if our egoic conditioning is running the show, there won’t be much clarity or depth, given the density of the lens. Our conditioning -- whether gross or subtle, superficial or deep, mundane or metaphysical -- will then tend to make the picks; if we identify with it, then we’ll think that we are making the picks, all but oblivious to our case of mistaken identity.

Secondly, even if we are getting a relatively clear read on what’s happening, we may nonetheless frame it in a way that simply reinforces habits in which we are still entrapped -- for example, if we are dependent on others’ approval or are prone to being overly self-critical, this will likely turn our apparent self-reflection into not much more than an exercise in self-deception, laced with self-flagellation.

We may think that we’re taking an honest look at our part in what has happened -- wanting to see what the situation “says” about us -- but in fact are only assigning too much responsibility (and causal agency) to that part, and too little to others. In letting them off the hook too easily, we simply impale ourselves on our good intentions, perhaps acting as if the resulting pain is an inevitable and even justified consequence of our having fallen short.

And, at the same time, we may feel a certain pride in our apparent willingness to take such a unguarded and probably unflattering look at ourselves, when we are in fact doing something very different -- namely, submitting to our conditioning while acting as if we are not. Such is the essence of idiot responsibility, namely the irresponsible practice of assuming and behaving as if we are being responsible when we’really just taking on --and assuming ownership of -- more responsibility than is actually ours; and such “responsibility” is not necessarily just something which we have taken on ourselves, but can also be inculcated in us by esteemed others.

Just as it’s easy to make our relational difficulties mostly about our partner, it’s just as easy to make them mostly about us. It all depends on which way our accusatory finger is pointing. If it’s aimed at us, the odds are that we are female; if it’s not, the odds are that we are male. Why this is so can be partially answered by considering the emotion that’s most often overlooked in psychotherapy and spiritual practice: shame. Shame usually feels so unpleasant, so painfully exposing, so mortifying, that we understandably want to get away from it as quickly as possible. A particularly common way of doing so is to convert our shame into aggression -- just think of how often those who have been shamed in a film redirect their energies into getting even or getting revenge.

But aggression is not always other-directed; it can also be self-directed. Many (mostly men) turn their shame-based aggression onto their partner, finding fault with, for example, her delivery of what she has to say, thereby conveniently framing her as the messed-up one; and many (mostly women) turn their shame-based aggression back onto themselves, casting an overly critical eye on their shortcomings, or on how they might have better put across their position or needs, thereby cutting their partner too much slack.

This tendency to take too much of the responsibility (which frequently gets degraded into blame) for our relational difficulties is rooted in a crushed, deflated, or otherwise disempowered sense of self, in which love-deserving me is largely supplanted by “bad” or “not-good-enough” me. Seeing how messed up we supposedly are reinforces this diminished sense of self, even as we try to make up for it by being “good” -- admitting our screw-ups, holding ourselves accountable for them, and so on, but taking this too far. Yes, what bothers us about our partner may say plenty about us as well -- as when what we don’t like about them is but a projection of what we don’t like about ourself -- but to assume that whatever bothers us about our partner is no more than a reflection of something less than loving in us simply cuts us off from taking needed stands with our partner, leaving us floundering in the excuse-polluted, confrontation-phobic riptides of idiot compassion.

Some may go so far as to assume, in allegiance to the New Age belief that we literally create our reality, that they -- and they alone -- have literally “created” whatever ills or misfortunes come their way, including in relationship. Such a narcissistic view -- me-centered to the extreme, however humbly, and infused with more than a trace of omnipotent fantasy -- not only bypasses the fact that what others around us are doing inevitably impacts and is impacted by what we are doing, but also is shame-inducing, in that it blames us for things over which we may have either no control or less than full control.

If a girl is raped, and we assume that she has “created” it and is therefore responsible for it (thereby saddling her with the dogma of a particularly pernicious variety of idiot responsibility), we are then, however inadvertently, okaying the rape, perhaps even asking (in spiritually sloppy New Age thinking that’s marooned from common sense and real compassion) what lessons she is trying to give herself by having chosen to be thus raped. (In the pantheon of dumb questions, this is a top contender, all wrapped up in its distorted, insensitive, emotionally vacant, and disembodied metaphysics.) If our partner is abusing us, and we choose to view this as having been created by us, then we are just doing time in a me-centered hell, cut off from any intimacy with the intersubjective space co-created by our partner and us, turned away from the no-bullshit forcefulness and consequence-delivering fierce compassion that our partner may actually need.

Just as there is idiot compassion (acting as if being unrelentingly nice and avoiding taking needed stands is somehow an act of genuine caring), idiot humility (making a virtue out of playing small and not excelling), idiot tolerance (politically correct acceptance and force-fed egalitarianism), and idiot understanding (the disembodied assumption that knowledge is synonymous with wisdom), there is idiot responsibility -- holding ourselves (or lettiing ourselves be held) overly accountable, as if doing so is an act of integrity, when in fact all we’re really doing is setting ourselves up for guilt (after all, if we’ve “created” our cancer, and we just can’t get rid of it, we are failing, aren’t we?).

However, we don’t so much create our reality, as we create our experience of our reality. Yes, we can have a tremendous impact in certain areas, hugely effecting and altering our reality, but that does not mean that we brought it into being. This is a tricky area, because sometimes we can have such an effect on our world that it seems as if we have actually formed or created it, as when a deadly disease miraculously disappears from us. How we are, and how we think, feel, and act, has a definite effect on our reality -- as both quantum physics and genuine spiritual practice demonstrate -- but there are so many factors at play, so many causes and causes of causes and so on ad infinitum, that we cannot conclusively really say -- let alone prove -- that we, and we alone, create our reality. To assume otherwise is to ignore the contingent nature of our existence. We not only exist in relationship, but through relationship -- which means, in part, that creativity is not a solitary but an inherently collaborative process.

If we say to those who have cancer that they have created it, and ask them why they would choose to do so, and what lessons they are trying to give themselves through making themselves so ill, we have, among other things, vastly oversimplified how things actually happen -- there are so many factors involved in their having cancer that there’s no way we can view and take into account all of them -- as well as trying to implant in such people the notion that they must have really screwed up somewhere (beyond obvious inner and outer factors, such as their emotional state and diet) to get so sick, forgetting that many great saints have had cancer, regardless of their degree of illumination.

None of this is to say that we ought not to take full responsibility for what we do with our lives, but that we would do best to only take responsibility for what is our part (which, of course, also takes into account its impact on others). To do more may seem noble or generous, but is really just deflated egoity having its time in the sun, no matter how dark the day. Genuine responsibility does not shame or blame, but simply is the capacity or ability to fittingly respond to what is happening, rather than just reacting to it.

Such responsibility does not fall prey to the inappropriate assuming of agency, but rather stabilizes us, grounding us in real integrity and compassion, preparing us for a deeper life, a life of fully embodied, ever accountable awakening to what we truly are. As we thus awaken, we go beyond belief into self-illuminating experience, no longer seducible by hope (nostalgia for the future) and knowledge, entering a domain where self-reflection is no longer self-deflection and where being responsible is not something we do, but naturally are.

January 23, 2007

WHERE’S THE JUICE?


“Where’s the juice?” This is a simple but highly relevant question ― great for cutting through arid intellectualizing and emotional flatness ― for a number of conditions, including that of relational intimacy.

She: “I’m tired of you not getting it.”
He: “I’m trying my best, and it’s never enough.”
She: “So why am I always the one who brings this up?”
He: “What do you mean ‘always’?”
She: “That’s it -- pick apart what I’m saying.”
He: “I’m trying to communicate, and I just get shot down.”
She: “I’m so sick of you feeling sorry for yourself.”
He: (Long tense silence)
She: “I don’t have much left.”
He: “So why don’t you just leave?”
She: (Starts to cry)
He: “I’m sorry...”
She: “No you’re not!”
He: (Rolling eyes up) “Okay, okay, you’re right!”
She: “You just don’t get it.” (Looks down and away)
He: “Don’t get what?”

A couple sits before me facing each other, drained and defeated-looking, almost too tired to face and explore what isn’t working in their relationship. Another couple sits in the same place, complaining about each other, but not taking any real stands, other than that of not taking a stand. And yet another couple, plunked down in the same spot, are putting all their energy into staying nice, reasonable, superficial. So we have the case of no juice, me-against-you quibbling juice, and let’s-keep-it-nice juice. In all three cases, things feel flat, uninspired, boring; there’s just not much excitement or passion. At the same time, though, there’s an unspoken commitment on the part of both members of the couple not to rock the boat beyond a certain point.

To investigate this commitment, this mutually deadening pact, is to encounter the core fears of each other. Some may not speak up because they are afraid that doing so might make their partner abandon them, through actually leaving or at least withdrawing or shutting down for an indeterminate period. Others may speak up more, but don’t take it as far as is needed, because they’d rather have the familiarity of being with their partner -- however unappealing that might be -- than the potentially scarier reality of possibly having to leave their partner for unknown territory. The craving for security, especially if we’ve had a far from stable history, can run very deep, keeping us hanging on in -- or overtolerating -- situations that we would seriously challenge or turn away from if we felt more stable.

The bottom line here is: If we are not secure in ourselves, not stably connected to and grounded in our core of being, and are therefore dependent upon what’s outside us -- for example, a partner -- for providing us with a reassuring sense of security, then we will not be capable of being in a truly liberating relationship. We’ll instead be in a relationship primarily because it seems to secure or anchor us, not really seeing that what we have entered is more prison than sanctuary. Thus do we do our relational time, until freedom and truth and love become more central to us than being secure -- and what irony there is in this, given that the embodying of freedom and truth and love actually secures us far more deeply than do security-centered relationships.

Being secure doesn’t mean that we don’t get insecure, but that our insecurity is not permitted to sit behind the driver’s wheel. When we really explore the nature of security, we realize right to our marrow that Life is inherently insecure; but if we stop short in that exploration, we will likely retreat into whatever most convincingly seems to secure us, including being in a relationship that, whatever its lack of juice, is nice and solid, or at least appears that way to enough of a degree to snare us.

If we, however, take our exploration of insecurity further, we will eventually find ourselves in the position of not minding our insecurity all that much, perhaps even finding some security in embracing our insecurity. There is great freedom in seeing, really seeing, the innate insecurity and ever-changing nature of Life. Unguardedly facing insecurity secures us, rooting us not in some bastion of immunity, but in love, truth, integrity, lucid awareness, happiness, passion, being.

Intimate relationship can be a sanctuary for embracing the inherent insecurity of Life, plugging us into the raw reality of our fundamental nature. In the very heart of Life’s perpetual perishing, we are none other than that for which we most deeply yearn; and the realization of this, when sufficiently embodied, secures us, rooting us in the boundless vastitude of the Great Unknown and the Love that pervades It. With even some of this ultimate sense of belonging at the center of our relationship, we cannot help but find freedom through intimacy. Moving toward this, and continuing to do so, is enough. It is more secure than security.

Then whatever happens in our relationship is but grist for the mill of Awakening -- and the more juice, the more energy, the more passion -- and I mean full-blooded passion -- we bring to this, the more fully it happens, the more powerfully the wheels turn and grind, the more spacious and open we become, simultaneously anchored in the Boundless and in the particular, letting our relationship with our beloved deepen our relationship with all that is.

January 28, 2007

MEN’S WORK: GUTS, HEART, PRESENCE

I’ve been offering men’s groups for a while, and just did another one yesterday. There was, as usual, plenty of emotional intensity and breakthrough, most of it in the spirit of reclaiming power without losing touch with one’s heart. This meant, in part, giving the boy in each man enough room and permission to express what had mostly gone unexpressed, such as rage at witnessing violence between his parents, violence before which he had either frozen or internally fled. Such feeling had had to be suppressed at the time, because it simply wasn’t safe enough to let it out; this was not so much an actual thought mulled over by the boy, but rather his survival intuition kicking in, protecting him from taking actions that may have endangered his life.

And how does this show up in present time? In all kinds of ways, many of which appear to be the opposite of others: caved-in posture and inflated posture; aggressive hand movements and limp hand movements; hostile tone and overly nice tone; and so on., all bearing eloquent testimony to past events powerful enough to leave lasting imprints. Once a particular pattern -- behavioral, postural, tonal -- has been sufficiently exposed so as to be obvious (and usually the last person to whom it’s obvious is the person doing it), then the historical forces animating it can be explored and illuminated, until the original energies that’d had to be suppressed -- buried, rerouted, ostracized, or denied to the point of seeming not to exist -- can be contacted and given expression, however slight.

When this happens, a man’s voice usually gets younger, higher, shakier, inhabited by vulnerable feeling -- his sounds naturally and spontaneously become the sounds of a boy. As such expression grows in fullness, becoming more and more deeply embodied, he starts to come alive, really alive, so much so that when he -- right after his work -- looks around the room, his eyes are not only full of shining boy, but also vibrantly grounded man, depressurized and unabashedly happy, rock-solid present yet also spacious and open.

Seeing a troubled man’s face losing years; seeing him settling into an effortlessly stable sense of presence; seeing him lighting up with love and insight and passion; seeing him artfully blending forcefulness and tenderness; seeing him finding a source of strength in his vulnerability; seeing him reclaiming his guts without diluting his love; seeing him exulting in the other men’s breakthroughs, seeing him honoring the feminine in himself without any diminishment of his masculinity; seeing him feeling complete in himself; seeing him really getting the primacy of connection and integrity in relationship; seeing him so deeply anchored in his being that he can really soar -- all this and more is what keeps me offering men’s groups.

After the men’s group, I went out for dinner with Diane, finding a nearly empty restaurant with great food -- an absolutely dynamite combo for me -- and then had a wonderfully lazy and loving evening. At 1 am, I wasn’t sleeping, but watching the men’s final of the Australian Open (one of the four major tennis tournaments of the year). Two men going all out to win. Fernando Gonzalez, ranked number 10 in the world (but over the past two weeks playing at an exceptional level), versus Roger Federer, by far the best tennis player in the world. What a treat! Watching great athletes competing is an invigorating joy for me; for the last third of the match, I was off the couch and on the living room floor, doing yoga while keeping my eyes on the game, fully absorbed in every point.

A couple of times, I thought of the men’s group from earlier in the day, and the various energetic confrontations that had happened for most of the men, all of which unfolded in the context of helping to more fully access passion, intensity, and awareness. The tennis match I was watching was doing something like this on a much more contained level, within a precise framework -- neat white lines on an immaculate green court -- but there was a continual undercurrent of passion, intensity, and awareness. Two elite athletes with clear mastery of their game (plus an obvious respect for each other), but nevertheless operating along such a fine, fine line that even the slightest slip was immediately magnified. Great, great concentration, dotted with tiny lapses every now and then. It wasn’t over until 3 am, but I didn’t mind at all.

Sports events are often broadcast through war metaphors -- football being probably the key example -- but Gonzalez and Federer’s match had little or none of this. It was a contest for sure, and highly competitive, but carried too much elegance and refinement to be framed as some kind of war. Not that it wasn’t suffused with adrenaline and testosterone -- but its very excitement was largely expressed through a heightened aesthetic of creativity and grace under pressure.

Back to the group: One man’s work was about his ambivalence regarding attention -- he both wanted attention and didn’t want it, having as a boy mostly only received attention when his mother wanted him to take care of her. The attention that he had really needed had not been there, and in his current life still wasn’t there nearly enough, mostly because he was simply not as open to it as he needed to be. As I had him pay close attention to his push-pull relationship to attention from others -- with the rest of the men serving as his audience -- he let down his guard, cutting through much of his self-consciousness, disarming himself to the point of letting his grief surface. This was not a straightforward process, but slowly but surely happened as the other men held him in their unwavering attention, presence, and care. Along the way, there was not only hurt and anger, but also plenty of healing humor. By this point, every man in the group was realizing that each man’s work was, in some way, none other than his work.

A sometimes arduous but essential labor this is, birthing the authentic man and learning to fully embody the Deep Masculine -- but after a certain point, what else is there for a man to do, if he is to ground himself in his heartland?