Inner Surfing

Peter Pan said, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

This pic is of my dear dad, who is on life's home stretch. Physicist, published novelist, violinist, museum director, jazz pianist... He is the small one in the middle. Until I visited him a couple of weeks ago, I never saw this photo, taken long, long ago (see how young Charles looks, pre-Diana!) nor my dad's "C.B.E." medal, (which means "Commander of the British Empire" and is one beneath a "Sir"). My family is so egalitarian that meeting the royal family was almost an embarrassing, anti-status event. However, I am now an American and am happy to exploit this status: time for some respect, guys, I'm the daughter of a Commander!!

I have to say I’m not too bothered about dying. My exploration of life, loss and NDEs, especially in the past two years (check out link at end of this blog), has reassured me of what I already knew ––there is no death. And in many ways the fun may begin when we drop the body, although I’m convinced the real fun begins when we drop the so-called self while staying in the body!

And my inner Wendy, with her Peter Pan sidekick, has been melting more and more into my Elder, whether they like it or not.

What I have to say now is this:
“To die into life will be an awfully big adventure.”

When my life and illusions fell apart last year, I remember saying to a few close friends “I’m done.” I felt––and still feel––like the Buddha, suddenly seeing the dreaded signs of aging, sickness and death, and realizing that human life is only for one thing: to wake up. I’ve had it with the illusion – the round of pain and pleasure, the tendency to place my trust and love in that which isn’t real or enduring. Buddhists call the human experience “samsara,” and they basically say you can’t fix it; you can just wake up from it. This doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it and have a fulfilling, abundant life. It just means that fulfillment and abundance can’t be based on thinking that the outer world is going to bring us what we crave…

Oh Gawd, I can hardly believe or BEAR that I am saying these words, so corny, so spiritually hackneyed do they sound! Same old words I heard when I first entered my spiritual path and became a monk at age 18. After decades of practice and service and life, my great realization is coming out in these same words? Yet some of the way I feel things isn’t quite so typical; like my experience of accessing the divine oneness through inner oceanic waviness, and my certainty that awakening has to be a literally “moving” experience on all levels (and as you know if you’ve been my student, this doesn’t necessarily mean physical exercise, except in the most subtle ways).

Anyway, I feel as though last year I was asked by life to die into life, to keep living with gratitude and enthusiasm and most importantly, to stay awake and aware, within the experience of great pain. For more than a year I found that I couldn’t numb my pain out; I don’t do drugs or alcohol; I could barely watch TV, despite quite a healthy previous basketball-watching habit. The only books I could read were about Reality with a capital R, despite my previous book-a-day practice which had meandered between crap and inspirational or scientific stuff. I could barely watch a movie (I just wanted to fall asleep watching videos of Eckhart Tolle). I was committed to not getting into another relationship to numb my pain. Anything that presented life in its illusory form just stuck in my craw like hard peanut butter. I felt allergic to anything except raw truth, and raw truth hurt.

So melting down this pain hasn’t been easy – it goes way beyond the ending of a marriage, family, home and dreams. A whole large lump of “me”––well, actually, what seems to be me but is actually fixated-self material––has had to be melted with it. I was just listening to Pema Chodron saying that while at a small retreat someone was apparently projecting hatred towards her, and she found this so painful that she ended up staying up all night, sitting in the pain she was feeling, leaving the story aside. By morning she felt a release, and realized that her whole ego structure had been designed to not feel this exact pain!

I can absolutely relate to this. Can you? I ask myself (and you can ask yourself along with me if you like): What is it that I am most afraid of feeling? And how am I structuring my presentation of self, and indeed my life, not to feel it? If intimacy brings it up, how am I designing––and rationalizing––my lifestyle to keep intimacy at bay? If it is criticism that wounds me at the core, how am I desperately trying to placate others, to dowse the fireball of projection that every unhealed one of us is always throwing at everyone else? If abandonment wigs me out, how am I trying to insure against it? If I am afraid of being nobody, how am I constantly trying to be somebody? If I don’t have a life, how am I trying to live through others, as savior or martyr? If being fully seen makes me fear that I won’t measure up, how do I make sure I hide, or fail in advance to avoid disappointment?… and on and on.

And did I answer these questions about myself, or about someone else I am trying to judge or fix?

At this moment in time, I find myself coming to the end of a long dark night in which I found myself sitting (rolling around “waving” and breathing on a furry rug, actually) in feelings I never wanted to feel, that I thought I had felt and completed. Until something else started to happen. Just as Pema Chodron felt something different in the morning, I find myself coming towards the dawn after my dark night and it’s pretty exciting.

I just went to England and spent time with my 88-year-old dad, who is very ill, and my mom (they have been divorced for 30+ years). Came back and found that the jetlag hit me very hard (I went over there on the nearly 12-hours-each-way plane journey twice in a few weeks). I also had taken, as an experiment, a cortisone shot for a shoulder that has hurt for 10 years despite doing everything naturally right for it. And this combination of insults to my body has put me in a physical funk. The cortisone also activated my emotional body; I got really cranky for a few days; found myself arguing with my bank manager one day. That evening a friend said, “Oh, you had a cortisone shot––have you had any arguments yet?” “Aha!” The next day as I prepared to go into battle with a shop assistant, I woke up: “Oops, I’m on steroids, sorry!” I told the woman, who thought this was funny and took care of me. I could have said I had PMS; but could I just say, “Oops, I’m on insane neurotransmitters, sorry!” or “Oops, I’m believing myself to be a separate self, sorry!”?

While teaching the last Soulwave One just before getting on the plane, I was in full-blown cortisone mode, and Sarah was giving me “Down, girl!” signals from the back of the room every now and then, as I got a bit “ramped up.”The students didn’t seem to notice and all had breakthroughs regardless.

Then, after a couple of days of cranky, I turned weepy, which coincided with seeing my mom. She didn’t seem to notice much difference. Then with jetlag and the inner chemicals, I couldn’t sleep, blah blah.

Before all this, as I reported in my last blog entry, I had been enjoying a movement into a more consistent awake space than ever before in my life. A space of full “nothingness.” So delicious. And now it’s as though I unconsciously had to “test” this awakening by bringing in various physical difficulties––historically my biggest challenge. The breathing witness fights back: “Aha!” I tell myself (if thought is inevitable, I may as well upgrade it): “There they are again, those painful feelings and thoughts trying to re-enter my consciousness or even become my identity. But they’re just the feeling/thought language of a particular neurotransmitter cocktail that my physical stress has restimulated. In other words, all that “stuff” is just chemicals. Who I think I am is a chemical soup. I am not that. I am the creator of that! I AM!”

But, as the What The Bleep movie rightly, and in my opinion most significantly pointed out, I am addicted to those chemicals, which I have come to think of as my “self.” Am I willing to go through the pain of withdrawal in order to be free from that artifact of self? Yup! Especially since I know how to surf a wave through that pain, which accelerates my journey and ensures I won’t get stuck.

So there was this familiar addictive “self” with a few new twists, trotting through my consciousness. Even today (12/7/05), which was not a good day physically, I woke up crying. A friend called while I was crying and said, “What’s up?” I said, “It’s just some detoxing I’m doing, and the brain chemicals are restimulating certain feelings and thoughts, but I don’t want to talk about any content because I could easily make a nightmarish story out of any aspect of my life. Even the cats seem to be looking at me funny but it’s probably just my weird altered consciousness!” I knew this was true because just a couple of weeks ago my same life circumstances of deep uncertainty had invoked deep gratitude, trust and joy. She didn’t quite get my point and persisted, asking about a particular situation, and I found myself telling her the story.

Sometimes you have to tell the story, and I don’t subscribe to the “no story” theory. As usual the absolute truth in this regard is “both/and.” In fact there is evidence from some grief studies that shows that you MUST tell certain traumatic stories a certain number of times, and that all your immune markers will get better as you tell them, until a critical point where retelling the story makes those markers go down. How can you know which trajectory you are on? Tuning into the bod, breathing and getting wet makes it pretty clear. You can’t tell for another person (they call this “taking someone else’s inventory”). You can tell for yourself whether saying it fixates you or unfixates you.

I was definitely on a “no story” turn of life’s river, as I had already sensed. As soon as I told my friend about the situation, I felt silly, because now the chemicals were really pumping. “Yes, “ I began to believe, “this is why I feel lousy; it’s this situation to do with (not) selling my house.”

But no it isn’t. It actually never is the situation, even when expressing yourself with someone loving to hold space really helps. I spent a few hours re-releasing that particular story and just being with (in a wavy and therefore effective way) the here-now experience of the strange “state” occupying my body. “Don’t believe a word it says,” I kept reminding myself, “And let the feeling move through my body on a wave.”

Well, it worked, as this motherwave/soulwave stuff amazingly does, every time, and I feel as though I have almost reset myself to where I was before the “setback.” In 12-step programs they say that setbacks are part of the path, and in Soulwave trainings I say that we learn in spiraling waves, and should expect some “ecstasy backlash” after major moves forward. Well, I’ve had mine, and I’m ready to continue my adventures.

For the last 2 years I’ve been in an exploration of a very deep surrender. Even when I was a monk in my 20s, I never surrendered this deeply. I am amazed at how brilliantly life has been unfolding my soul’s destiny pathway as I stop trying to control-create what I want or make it happen. It’s not that I don’t have intentions or desires or preferences, and I certainly make those clear to “Life.” But I have been exploring the––for me––radical experiment of being okay with what is, knowing that it is all dynamically unfolding towards my highest good. The difference from my old way of thinking is that what I now consider my highest good is spectacularly higher. I have been shown what is actually available.

Recently many exciting opportunities have come towards me re my book and career expansion. (They’re not coming through strife and struggle and PR, I can tell you that! In fact one major doorway-opener recently walked through my front door unexpectedly while I was relaxing into a feeling of spaciousness while reading the Victoria’s Secret catalog!). I’m going to be taking some journeys. The next phase of my life is starting to move in. They say that “when one door closes, another opens, but man these corridors suck.”

I feel as though I am getting to the end of the corridor, and some doors are opening. Inner doors are definitely opening; and of course they go together with outer doors. I don’t have to find them. They are finding me. This seems to be the way it works. I can’t fake it. I can’t try to go through an inner doorway so that the outer world will conform to my demands for control. But since I actually am finally going through those doorways I never thought I would choose, those full-surrender doorways that my feisty soul resisted for ages, it seems as though the heavens are getting ready to open up and rain down on me.

I’ll let you know what happens.

Check out this amazingly inspiring NDE story:
Journey Through the Light and Back by Mellen-Thomas Benedict