DatingGod

Richard Rose

"Maybe it's for the best," Rose was saying to a heavy-set man standing at the end of a row of chairs, as if ready to walk out at any moment. "If people really thought about what they're promised in church, they'd realize how absurd it all is. I mean, who wants to spend eternity sitting around with a bunch of cherubs playing harps? After awhile people would want to go to Hell just for the change of scenery."

"Well, I don't agree with everything organized religions may espouse," the man said, in a tone that indicated their disagreement had been going on for some time. "But they do give people a reason to strive for goodness and for a better world." Many in the audience nodded their heads or voiced their agreement.

"No they don't," Rose said firmly. "What they do is give people an excuse to keep from working to improve their personal state of being, and perhaps their after-death state as well. Religion tells you we're all going to the same place. People think God has to operate under the human concept of justice, and it wouldn't be fair if we all didn't go to the same place. So they figure they can just sit back and ride the tide of humanity into Self-Realization.

"The worst of it is that these kinds of beliefs keep people from looking for real answers," Rose went on. "Every sentient being needs to know his cause, needs to know if he was created or merely the product of accident. What he doesn't need is to be placated or silenced by some political social group that hands out fairy tales and calls them the word of God."

The questioner had been moving toward the door and now stood right next to me as he turned back to Rose.

"These 'political social groups,' as you so disparagingly call them, provide great solace for a great many people," he said. The crowd nodded its approval again.

"Maybe," Rose shot back, "but for how long? If a man has even a shred of curiosity or self-honestly, he'll wake up one day and realize he's been deluding himself for thirty years. Society and religion brainwash a man into thinking he has to believe a certain way. So he tries to assume a posture he thinks will mesh with what's expected of him. First he puts one over on society--convincing them he fits in, that he's a nice fellow, that sort of thing. Then he puts one over on himself by believing his own act. By this time he’s hopelessly caught in the web of lies that has become his life.

"But the thing is," Rose said, his voice rising, "there will come a time in everyone's life when you come to doubt everything you ever thought. Unfortunately, for most people it doesn't occur until it's too late to do anything about it. In the meantime, the majority of people just slide along, reasoning that because the public doesn't complain about their social behavior, they must be on the right track on all levels. They pay their taxes, get along with the fellow next door, do a decent job at work. To them, these are the signs of a sufficient theology."

"What your alternative, then?" the man persisted.

"You mean something I can explain to your satisfaction in twenty-five words or less? Forget it. It would take twenty-five hundred just to get you confused, then a lot more to try and explain away the confusion."

"Well, then I'd say the problem lies with your inability to communicate," the man said. Then, as if suddenly realizing he'd just spoken a perfect exit line, he hurriedly opened the door and left. Rose watched impassively, then turned to the rest of the audience.

"Maybe he's got a point. There's times I find it difficult to even know how to begin delivering a lecture. I have trouble communicating because when you find out that this whole existence is a projection, you lose enthusiasm for feeding people what they want to hear about the significance or appeal of the illusion.

"You see, I don't want to bring you peace of mind. I want to bring you trouble. I want to stir you, to shake you. Because protoplasm tends to inertia. You have to keep irritating it to keep it alive, so to speak. It has to be continually stimulated. Complacency is a very negative trait for a person who wants to progress in his mental capacities.

"In fact, if you’re interested in finding your self-definition, you need to abandon any philosophy or system that quiets you down. You need to continually awaken yourself, to arouse yourself mentally, to attack your systems of thinking. Because you don't want peace, you want an answer."

- From After the Absolute, the Inner Teachings of Richard Rose

by Dave Gold

available to read online for free at On Zen

I'm a Big Fathead, Except When I'm Not

Almost $500 in vet and med costs later, and three months into the process, I finally look at the truth of what is going on with Wallace, and began using my healing skills, psychic abilities, to help the sweet little weasel get well. 

I was lying in bed a couple of weeks ago, crying about Wallace and my total f*cking inability to do anything for him. I'd asked one of my fellow psychics at the holistic center if she had any insight into his condition and she said: he'll lose the eye, and it looks like he doesn't have more than a couple months to live. And although I've been feeling these very facts for many weeks now, hearing them out of someone else's mouth was devastating to me. So devastating, that in spite of the fact that I very much needed the money, I packed up my things, and went home.

But as I lay in bed that night, crying, it hit me. I asked myself: why don't you use your healing skills, the skills you've been training and practicing and using wholeheartedly for others for the better part of two decades? The quick answer was that I'd tried and he pushed at me until I let him go, then he got up and ran away, much like the Hoon did. But I pushed myself for a deeper answer and asked: well, they don't like the western meds being put in their eyes, shunted in via a needle and a hole in their skin, but you do that to them, and they fight it, but then grudgingly allow it, so why not energy medicine? And I saw that mostly, what kept me from doing it, was that I was afraid it wouldn't work. Maybe it was the mainstream graduate degree that gutted what used to be a rock solid knowledge of its validity, but the bottom line was I felt afraid, that in spite of spending the last decade of my life using it for my own health, using it in professional practice for my clients, I feared that it really was as fraudulent  as popular scientific medicine says it was. 

I had to sit with that realization for a while before I could muster the courage to face the truth of that, that I was withholding healing because of my own fear of failure. Then it took more time, to get past the rage and ridicule I felt for myself, for this pitiful excuse. Then memories came flooding back. Of friends and lovers rejecting me, rejecting what I do. Of my own family laughing continuously at the holistic work I do, at never missing an opportunity to make a disparaging remark, or to ask for my advice, and then pointedly doing the opposite because well, I'm just flaky, aren't I? 

I thought of all the clients I've helped over the years, of the good information I've given them, the things I've helped them heal inside their bodies and minds. Of the friends that were able to listen to what I was telling them, what I was seeing, how they were able to take the truth of it and use it to mend the breaks, detox themselves, make changes.

And I saw that over the years, I've gotten very, very good at keeping my psychic abilities and healing skills to myself. How I've disciplined myself to never ever speak about what I see unless invited to. How I've learned not to spontaneously share insight, info with my family, no matter how sick they got, no matter how damaged they were becoming from the western med treatments they kept using, because they were very clear that they seriously, vehemently, weren't interested. 

I also saw that in terms of healing work, I've kept my personal and professional worlds separate for a long time. And I saw why.

I saw that doing a session with a client is straightforward. They come into my session space, and I can tell right from the beginning how successful the treatment will most likely be, how obvious it is in how they behave with me. Maybe a doctor feels this way, sees in a patient's speaking that they aren't taking responsibility for their health, that they won't take the meds as prescribed, won't follow the regimen of keeping a wound clean or quitting smoking or refraining from hoovering up a gallon of vodka a week. Regardless, I do my best. I take a deep breath, smile into the sun inside, and turn that sun outward, use it to look inside of the person, to look for breaks, problems with their electrical system, their organs, the chemical levels in their brain, the issues effecting their chakras. And I've been doing it for so long, that it's like stepping into the ocean on a gorgeous sunny day, letting the waves move us gently back and forth, bobbing up and down in the sea, the sun so luscious, so Yes. 

And I saw how trying to do this very same type of session with a friend or lover hadn't been possible, how they didn't want to expose themselves like that to me, be that vulnerable, that seen. And how there is a very good, very real reason that physicians don't treat their own family members, except for really basic issues, how a surgeon would never operate on her husband, her child, her best friend. 

Then I saw the stark truth of it: Wallace was dying, and I was out of money for more vet care, which even as useless as it's been still held hope. I got that unless I was at least willing to try, that he'd most likely lose the eye in the next month, and be dead by spring. And so I tried. 

I gathered him up, and began experimenting. He fought against it pretty hard to start with, but I stayed with him, firmly but gently, not forcing, but not letting go either. When doing things like giving him meds by mouth, or putting salve in his eye, in his open wounds, cleaning the inside of eyes with warm saline, pulling gunky discharge out of the swollen sensitive eye tissue with a clean cloth, I'd found that I could talk to him, send love to him. Though he obviously didn't like it, and didn't want it, he'd trust me enough, surrender enough, to at least let me do what needed to be done. 

One of the first things that became obvious is that he wouldn't let me do the same hand motions, of scanning, of pulling things out of the energy field. The quick movements scared him, the constant contact and fiddling on his body irritated him. So I began working above the body, slowing things down, using more of my internal eye, less of what I could manipulate with the energy of my hands, and more of what I could do with the energy inside of me that reached out to mingle with his. 

One of the most marked things I realized was when working with a stranger how objective I was. I might feel compassion, or even their pain, but I didn't much feel pain of my own in response to what I saw in them. With Wallace, when I saw how corrupted, how twisted, how shut down and stunted his first chakra was, the anguish I experienced nearly shut me down. In twenty over years of working with chakras, I'd never seen one so damaged, and I didn't even know where to start. 

First chakra is usually a bright vibrant pulsing red. It looks like a cone, a vortex, and a strong first is sucking up energy from the earth, funneling, transmuting earth energy into a form that flows up the energy body, enabling the organic being to be alive. Think of the food you eat, how it is a form of dense material energy, and your mouth is the initial opening that receives it, breaks it down with teeth and saliva and tongue, then moves the food into the next stage for absorption, the next phase in the digestive process. The first chakra is the mouth for the energy system, your electrical system, how you take in electrical energy from the earth, and how through your chakra system, channel the energy up, connecting it to the energy coming in from the universe, the cosmos, or whatever it is that you want to call that place Out There. 

Wallace's first chakra looked like a black flower, or sea anemone, turned in on itself, only the faintest traces of dark red moving through it. I had to make a few passes over it to be able to handle the reality of what I was seeing. Then I got to work, doing what I always do when I work, first looking deeply, then going with what I intuited needed to be done. I worked with him about an hour that first night. And then we snuggled up and slept.

He woke me up around 4am like he usually does, this small ghostly apparition that stands on my chest, staring at me in the dark until I open my eyes. I smell him before I see him, his peppery scent pulling me gently out of my sleep. And when I opened my eyes that morning, the moonlight beaming through the window, what I immediately saw was that instead of one dark eye staring at me, I saw two. And when I began to stroke his fur, both eyes blinked in that Love Look way that kitties do, and he began to purr. 

Over the past two weeks, I've been doing energywork on him several times a day. I even do it long distance during breaks at my cubicleland job. I've discovered how to mix the petting and light massage he loves with energywork techniques, spinal flushes, even as I continue applying herbal salve to the wounds that have rapidly healed, the lysine to keep the virus from multiplying, the western med steroids to the eye to clear up the last bit of inflammation that as of this morning, after three months, is almost totally gone. He purrs like crazy now when we do it, lying on my chest like a blissful sphinx, soaking up the luscious rays of adulation flowing from my hands and mind and heart, a simple conduit for Life and Love and The Universal Energy that is all of our birthrights, fuzzy, less fuzzy, animal, vegetable, and mineral.

He still sneezes, and while his gums have stopped bleeding, they're still a little swollen. The ulcer that had formed over the entire front of his eye is now just a little patch. His first chakra is still not in great shape, but the black is gone, and rather than a folded in flower, it looks like a pool of bright red. Every day, we work on strengthening the boundaries, on keeping the spirals moving like the sparkly little lemniscates they are, filling every cell in his body with Yes, Yes, Yes. 

This all just may be temporary. It might be that finally, finally, the western meds kicked in, his immune system finally matured enough to begin the healing process. It's most likely a combo of all of it. And/or he still might be shuffling off his mortal coil in the next few months. Who knows?

And see for yourself, he looks dang good, and is one handsome little weasel:

Ultimatum

Random Stuff Rolling Around the Noggin

• I look to the thoughts to tell the emotions what to feel. The thoughts are like non-stop shouts from the peanut gallery. The thoughts seem like they are headlines taken from every experience I've ever had or read about or seen on tv, then the bad ones I'd rather not have in The Now are shouted the loudest. This is what I seem to be basing my Feelings on: jewish grandmas decamped in my psyche (no dis to the awesome children of zion intended, because seriously, i dated a lot of jewish guys when i lived in nyc and their grandmas could peel paint off a wall with their apocalyptic warnings of horrific possibilities, though they always looked dang cute doing it)  

  

• Been noticing objects a lot lately. As in my love for them is directly correlated to their utility. I love this spoon, will seek it out over all of the other yard sale/salvation army spoons in the drawer. It is not too big, not too small, and it's curvy design on the handle feels soft in my palm.

• Or these socks, a pair of Thor-lo horse-riding socks I found for $4 at an outlet store, and that I modified by cutting off the too long top. To someone with snootier aesthetics, they are funky, old, frayed. To me, they are heaven on a cold foot on a chilly night.

• During my lunch hours in cubicleland, I walk down to a funky urban park and sit on a patch of grass, and watch the sky, the birds, the trees. No matter how cold, that's where I'll be, sitting on my towel, eating my avocado slices and wedges of manchego cheese, gluten-free corn muffins and jalapeno-stuffed green olives. After I eat, I walk, walk around downtown and compose blog posts in my head, because I'd rather be writing, but there really isn't enough time over lunch, and so I compose posts in my head, which are all about the personality deconstruction I'm undertaking. This past Thursday's walk however, didn't play out as it usually does. This time, as I began walking, I walked under a huge tree, and looked up, and was stopped in my tracks. Millions of glistening leaves, fluttering in the wind, sunlight bouncing off each vibrantly beaming green leaf, off the chocolatey, loamy bark. And in that second all I could think of was how utterly gorgeous it was, and then, small explosions of: what animals lived there? what would the limbs feel like as I climbed up? what would the leaves taste like? And I got a flash of how this is what I was like as a child, curiosity as the passion that fueled me, how I climbed every tree, rolled around in the grass, built forts and examined flowers and watched bugs. And how whatever this deconstruction is that I'm doing, it is wiping enough Adult out of me so that I can see through the shiny lens of Childhood again. I spent the rest of my lunch hour walking around and gazing in awe at all the trees, all the amazing, lovely, majestic, luscious trees . . .  

  

• Wallace is really so dang handsome. Even with his weepy, opaque eye and his funky sores and his super-tangy breath. He is just such a gorgeous, soft, punky sweet wonder. However long I get to hang with him, I'm grateful. (His fur smells really good, too, like honey and summer forest)

  
  
  

• Jacinta slowly begins trusting me again, climbs into my arms in the morning for snuggles, washes my face and hands again as she purrs like an emphysemic trucker. The biggest change is in me, as I've stopped looking to her to give me love, and instead gone back to simply being her Katmamma, and holding her in that sweet surrendered space of Yes again. This is why she's trusting me again. Because she can trust that the energy is flowing back towards her, not from her, as she needs all the energy she's got with the illness she's dealing with. My job is to take care of her. Her job is to allow me to snuggle her, and warm myself in the glow of her Jacinta-ness, her Cat-ness.

  

• This is what I most often see:

  
  
  

• But then I walk in a catch them doing this and my cockles, they are warmed:

• What is it about making a huge vat o' stew that is so frakkin satisfying? There are the layers of the scent of cooking in the air, the kitties' whiskers twitching at the scent of meat, the rhythmic chopping of vegetables, the resonant plop as they hit the boiling water. And then there is the food itself, so many dang things going on in this potato, carrot, pole bean, cabbage stew beyond the obvious including grease and leftover strips of the bacon I made for brunch, caraway seeds, dried dill from my herb garden last summer, a hamsteak that was on sale up the local Harris Teeter (the grocery store affectionately known as 'The Teet' in these here parts) and lots and lots of pepper. Slurping stew in the park this week is gonna be fun . . . 

  
  
  

Katana

It's Saturday morning. No cubicleland work today. Just some holistic stuff in a few hours. I'm tired from the week, but pretty lucid. Lucid is good. I'm not always particularly lucid these days. I never know how the consciousness is going to roll around. Does this sound fruity? It feels fruity. Like I'm The United States of Tara, the Enlightenment Edition, but without the the different costumes or the high quality health care as I am still, very, very uninsured. 

It's also fruity because it's like having two warring states of consciousness inside of me, one that is Ego Up, and is about either anger/arrogance or joy/confidence, the other is Ego Down, and plays itself out as despair, either depression or anxiety. And then there's the third consciousness, that I've no clue what to call other than Yes, and even that isn't right because it's more of a blankness, a quiet, a Nothing. It doesn't express much of anything. Just seems to be there when the other two noisy roommates are taking a snooze on the couch or are having a pint up at Slick & Red's Tavern or gone to wherever it is they go when they simply are Not There anymore. 

On the drive home from cubicleland Thursday, I was thinking about these three states, about how horrific things were til I had a clearer understanding of what was going on. I spent two decades of hard work at spiritual stuff, though the consistency during the first decade was a few years on, a few years off, etc. The second decade was a very rigorous studying and training and keeping to a very intense daily, hourly spiritual practice routine. 

Over the course of the second decade, I turned everything toward vibrant health. Every week was a layering of a new practice, a new skill, a new regimen. Qi gong, yoga, meditation, strength training, rollerblading, energywork sessions once or twice a week. There were weekly sessions with my teacher, and a weekly class with she and the other members of our spiritual school where we studied and practiced everything from breathwork to chakra balancing, Hawaiian kahuna energywork and psychic skills training, crystals and aromatherapy and herbs and sweat lodges. I cleaned up my diet and feng shui-ed my apartment. I amassed so much knowledge and skill that I became an holistic practitioner myself, feng shui-ed a hospital's cancer ward, ran meditation and holistic health classes at corporations. I practiced tantric relationship with my lovers. I wrote prodigiously, always about the spiritual growth I was undergoing. 

The transformation I was putting myself through was the hardest thing I'd ever done. And while it was excruciating, it was also outrageously luscious and joyful and calm and sweet and more satisfying and uplifting and full of purpose and rightness and Yes than I'd ever experienced. It was hellacious on a level I'd never before gone through, and there were a lot of dark days, but the emotional, mental payoffs after staying with the practices and regimens were so great that it was worth it and drove me on to go deeper. I was spending entire days, weeks suspended in what felt like effortless support from the universe, when everyone and everything around me reflected back to me: Yes, Yes, Yes, where I could feel the eyes of some hilarious, friendly, loving Being always on me, leading me on, loving me through my life and the things that were brought to me.

At one point I remember someone saying something about how they were feeling angry or stressed and it occurred to me that I hadn't felt anger in over a year, so long that I barely remembered what it felt like. I remember thinking: wow, this is incredible, to be free of emotions like that, to be done with anger. There was a sense of having been emptied out, of anger and fear, but also of my past, like the baggage had been jettisoned. There was an acknowledgment of completion, of having made it through the transformation to a place of spiritual maturity. At one point my teacher turned to me and said, her eyes shining, you did it, you've done it, just look at how far you've come, just look at you. 

A few months later, my life shifted into an ever more luscious place, where everything felt as if fate had stepped in, and finally, finally, everything was coming together. Best friend, soulmate, holistic work getting busier with a higher profile, spiritual teacher that I loved and trusted, healthy and strong body. And then, less than a year later, it was all gone, all over, like a bomb had gone off. As I stepped away from the smoke and rubble, I gave away my material possessions and found that I was utterly alone, just me and the kitties moving into a cabin in rural Virginia for a few months, trying to get my bearings, attempting to understand what had happened, what I was going to do next. 

Over the next four years, whatever was left of the spiritual life unravelled inside of me. At a loss as to what direction to head in, I went back to school, then graduate school. Whatever was left of the 'spiritual' in me was slowly, painfully sloughed off. By the end of last year, there was no trace left of a smiling, loving Being. And no matter how much yoga or meditation or biking or clean diet I did, there was no more Feel Good, at least not in the carrot-or-stick manner of delivery. All those years of lusciousness were about effort=payoff, as in clean diet=feel good, spiritual practices=feel clear, exercise=HellYeahDoIFeelAwesome. What followed that bomb going off four years ago was that nothing I did could touch the pain, assuage the loss, everything I knew to get me back on track, make me feel better, was utterly gone, and it blew my muthafrakkin mind.

For a long time, I often felt cursed somehow, as if I were such a horrible human being that no matter what I did, I would always be f*cked. But a couple of years ago, I found Jed's books and things began to make more sense. I began to see that for the past twenty years, I'd rigorously trained myself to be a performing monkey. I'd do the dances of qi gong and yoga, and be rewarded with a serotonin tidbit. I'd do the sit and roll over of Being A Good Spiritual Student and god/life/spirit would pat me on the head and heart. I'd squeak the correct sequences of Spiritual Speak and receive a biscuit filled with BlissJoyAndEcstasy. 

But four years ago, although I kept performing, the treats stopped coming. I tried new routines, new sequences. I tried longer sessions, shorter sessions, mixed sessions. I even tried to turn the role of science student into a spiritual routine. But nothing worked. There were no more mystical experiences, realizations of Oneness, intimacy with All Is Love. And there would be no more teachers to Show Me How. Or even friends with whom to swap stories or notes or help along what had become a dark path. And any attempt to forge, force, any of these was met with obvious awfulness, teachers who were clearly nutty buddies, potential new friends whose idea of friendship was me listening to them complain for hours and hours on end as I sat there mute, eyes bugged at the weirdness, old friends with whom there was no longer a shared language.

Then, a huge shift happened. All last summer, I kept having an exquisitely strong feeling that something amazing was coming. I just needed to hang on til September. I would be going about my day, and I would sense it on the horizon, and I would shiver with anticipation. I wondered what it could be: moving to the ecovillage? finding an agent for my novel? But as those of you who've been coming here for a while know, in September, in the space of ten days, Calhoon got sick, and then died. 

For those of you who haven't been coming here for long, The Hoon was a 20-pound luscious feline who had been traveling with me for 16 years. And through all of the changes, all of the moves, all of the shifts, The Hoon was always there, this pasha of love presence, consistently full of love and hilarity and warm fuzziness and scratchy tongued kisses as we snacked and watched dvds. No matter what Wrong or Horrible or Terribly Un-Fun thing happened in my world, The Hoon was always Yes, always Love, and always good for a laugh and a deeply awesome snuggle.

And in the wake of his death, which devastated me in a way that caused something inside of me to die, my other feline, Jacinta, also got gravely ill. She went into the vet clinic for three days of isolation for the implantation of a radioactive seed, which changed her from a sweet, fierce, loving snugglehead, into a growling, unhappy, isolated crabbypants. And my human family, that I'd been in a cautious relationship with after all the years away from them, also turned mean, in a way that shocked me, and understanding that I didn't have the energy to deal with the blows, I cut off contact with them. The income from my holistic work, in the wake of a tanking economy, also tanked, and I took the first job I could find, a four day a week horribly stressful job in the field of social services. I began having dreams of a small, orange kitten, woke up one morning, drove to a local pet rescue, and adopted the kitten I'd seen in my dreams, who within days would reveal that he had an auto-immune disease which will most likely claim his left eye, and whose life is being held together through rounds of meds and treatments, applied several times a day.

And so that is where I was a few weeks ago, no love, no friends, no family. Only stress and upset, death and loss, illness and money poor, crappy in mind and body and heart. All hell, all the time. Except for random moments of Yes. I never knew when they would come. They weren't connected to anything I said or did or tried to do. I'd just be going about the bidness of things that need to get done, and then I'd be in one, a moment of Yes. And it wasn't the YES that I used to experience, but a quiet Yes, almost a sort of benign blankness, most notably an absence of the usual hellishness that surrounded me like a pyre.

I began turning my focus, my attention to this quiet Yes. What was it? What was it connected to? How could I have more of it? And I began to see that instead of a product of Doing, it was the space left behind when I stopped trying, when I let go, what remained in the moments usually occupied by Efforting. And because there was so little distraction from friends or family, of the responsibilities of "love" and work that demanded Spiritual Party Tricks, the path in front of me became starkly lit up. Two choices and two choices only: hell or not-hell. 

And that is where I'm at. For so long I've wondered if I'm cursed with unhappiness. But now I see that it's finally time to let go of the concept of happiness, to release thought and emotion and the drama of my living, see what lies underneath them. To let go for good the idea that god is a big daddy who brings Nice Things to Those Who Please Him, or even a benevolent nature mommy who is fecund and gracious and generous with those who revere her with their grandmother compassion and use of organic produce.

But of course, I could just be nuts, or simply fruity flavored of the usual misanthropic, nihilistic, scary-loner variety, that well-trod path of Those Who Sip Of The Sour Grape. This is part of the fun of it all: not knowing what the heck is going on other than what is distinctly Not going on. And a sense of purpose. Something driving me forward To Know. Acknowledging that Something Is Happening, cutting off all paths of retreat. The presence of a kind of moonlight that sparkles in the water as I paddle in my little canoe, across a vast expanse of ocean at night, just me and a couple of crabby felines, the occasional whisper on the wind of other folks on similar sea voyages, just enough food, money, interaction with other humans to live, to be alive, to keep going. 

And that's enough. And I'm okay with it all. Surrendered to what Life brings and what it takes away, I feel a sense of default gratefulness, that I'm not dead yet, that who and what has died around me is part of the flow of Life-Death that is the motion of this place we call earth. I've got a long way to go, or a long space til I fully see that I'm not going anywhere, or whatever it is that is this thing called Waking Up. 

Because it's all Yes . . . behind the hell it is so incredibly quiet and still and empty . . . and I'm so very dang grateful . . . to be alive . . . to be alive  . . . 

President Yes

Tell me this ain't the muthafrakkin bomb:

The New White House Website

And don't forget to subscribe to Obama's New Blog!

(Again and again and again I snuck away from cubicleland yesterday, to the lunchroom tv, to my car and its radio, to listen and watch as our new president took office, to the goings on in Washington. Damn, he is so handsome, so beautiful, so radiant, so full of life and love and smarts. I can't wait to see what this man and his amazing team of smartypants pull off, what they wrangle us all into doing. So many of us have dreamed for so long of what America, with its rich minds and hearts and resources, is really capable of in transforming this world into something true and clear, full of compassion and integrity and the knowledge that We Are All Connected. It's so exciting to see someone at the helm who dreams that too. And dang if he ain't the man with the plan . . .)

What Love Really Looks Like

I want to adopt a dog so much right now. And an elephant:

Obama's People

The NYT has This up at their site - a series of portraits of Obama's incoming administration. They were asked to show up for the photo session with an object that means something to them, and what they chose to bring is so very telling. These pics, just the people and their objects set against a simple white background, fell like captured intimate moments, windows into their personalities, and the energy coming off of them felt dang good. 

Hell Vs. That Other Stuff

I was just sitting here, this sense of quiet excitement, awe, wonder pulsing through me. At what's happening inside this process I call my life. At what's occurring.

I've spent the better part of twenty five years on the spiritual path, pursuing enlightenment. I've lived in an ashram, studied yoga and meditation. Worked with masters, learning powerful techniques to transmute energy, for myself and others. Been a healer for the better part of a decade. Always searching to transform the wounds of abuse, both genetic and environmental, into something of truth, of use, of clarity.  

Again and again I've opened into the place inside where there is no place, only love. I've felt god singing in my cells, raining into me as the geese flew overhead, the thunder flashed around me, the flowers burst into a gorgeous northeast spring. I've felt the power of god flowing into me using the gentle fierce gaze of the beloved.  

But none of it meant anything, except as preparation for what I'm doing now: turning and staring down into hell, the hell inside of me, the hell of thoughts and feelings and beliefs, evasions and sidesteps and defenses and various ploys that were never anything more than ego placing its hands over its ears and saying lalalalalalalalalalalalala. 

All these years, I believed with all my heart that it was about purifying myself somehow through all of the practices and rituals, cleansing diets and uplifting scented oils, sage advice from sainted lips and revered loved ones. I thought that I was heading towards Enlightenment, a place populated with soulmates, bathed in prosperity, bliss for breakfast, no-more-pain for lunch, and a delightful organic dinner spent with people who are never, ever mean. But it's not about any of these things, about these passing states of good times with friends, ecstatic hours with lovers, free flowing cash to spread around, endorphin highs from vigorous exercise, and the joys of a really healthy colon. 

It's about turning, slowly, slowly, and facing the thing you fear the most, being with the people you hate most to share air with, the life situation you dread being in the middle of, of standing in the undeniable proof of your pointlessness, your ordinariness, the fact that one day, sooner than later, you'll be dead, oh so very dead, that what you thought was so Very, Fabulously You, will in fact be nothing but some bones and memories that live on for a while in the brains of folks who knew you, until they too die and become the molecular building blocks for a hermit crab, a ham sandwich, a roll of toilet paper. 

It's about standing in the path of whatever is awful and all up in my face - someone yelling, judging, powertripping, the anger, pathos, negativity, and all the rest of it  - and finding that if I don't turn away, or flinch, or try to push it away, or change the other person - what I find is that the awful feeling is in me and nowhere else. The awful is inside of me, born of a thought I'm having, a belief I hold, a desire to be liked so that I can feel okay, a judgment about what is okay or not okay in terms of behavior, energy, word and volume choice. And if I let go of the awful clench inside of me, all that's left is a person outside of me, wiggling around with their own stuff. But it isn't mine. It's only mine if I activate inside of me. 

It's about how we want the spiritual path to be about positivity and love and forgiveness and feeling good, but how these are only the side effects of having faced our mental-emotional-shit-hybrid and set it down for the slop it is. Because if we *try* to have these expansives in our living, it's really only faking it, and some part of us knows this. So instead of attempting to feel full and satiated, we need to go ahead and set out to find the buffet.

The past couple of days, I've been thinking a lot about jesus, as in the very real guy who got strung up on a couple of pieces of wood by a bunch of guys who were appalled at what he said to people, at the cultural fabric he tore up and let fly on the breeze, him laughing all the while, showing folks that they were surrounded by food, healing, love, there for the saying of Yes. And about how he had to turn and face his own hell, and how he felt god abandon him, and how he surrendered anyway, on nothing but faith, in the process, in what was happening to him, because he had no other choice except for the choice between hell and Something Else. 

It's so easy to forget how far I've come, when I'm so consumed with watching my ego fight, kick, bite for survival, wreak havoc on feelings and thoughts and bodily functions. In the past few years, I've faced the myth that is romantic love as a permanence, seen that it's simply another of Life's hilarious, majestic flame-throwing tools, designed to help a person become the Human Torch that is his/her destiny. In my world, there will be no more Soulmate. 

I saw that 'spiritual work' is a sham, a time waster, a money pit, and actually a very, very stoopid way to spend a life. It actually keeps a person so busy, so caught up with making the Special Hand Gestures, mouthing the Correct Terms, and keeping up with the Chopras in what to wear, buy, and consume that there is no energy left over to genuinely wake up to what is Really Going On. 

I stopped taking on teachers, finally understanding that the only real advice can come from inside. It wouldn't even occur to me anymore to call someone to get help with a "problem". The only thing that can assist me now is someone who has been through this territory I navigate, who can give possible tips as to my probable orientation on the map. Note the use of the words 'possible' and 'probable', because really, at this point, it's a solo journey, with only the company of a couple of fuzzy guys for companionship.

I became first accepting, then comfortable, then hilariously happy at this solitariness. There are so many disparaging words for the folks that set off by themselves, who cut away from the herd. Loner, recluse, hermit - none of them are meant as compliments. (Although to me they sound wonderful, and lone wolf has a nice shamanic ring to it.) And I don't know where I'll end up, just that after all these years, I'm finally walking strong, and with real purpose, even as I've no clue except what to do in this moment, and then this one. 

There is a reason it's called The Dark Night of the Senses, because what you sense, with all that a human has to sense with, is oh so very dark. But what's awesome about finally surrendering to the hell you've been running away from all of your life, trying so very very hard to keep from happening, is that things become very clear. If you don't want to be in hell, you have to choose the other thing, the thing you don't understand, not what it really is, or what it really means, or even how to surrender to it. Which is where the whole Faith thing comes in. Because you get that when you are in that place where the choice is between Hell and That Other Thing, you have faith that you can choose the other thing and it's all going to be okay, whether that means death, either metaphorically, spiritually, or literally.  

Because in the end, we're all going to die. The real thing is whether we have really lived. And I'm really really sick of a half-lived life. I'd rather die today than live another month of pretending we're all not f*cked, flustered, and far from home.  

As I drive home from my cubicleland job each day, I keep the radio off and do not stop for snacks or wine. As I drive, I roll the windows down so that I can feel the cold wind on my face. In the silence and the cold, I move my awareness around my body, mind, heart, to witness, acknowledge the damage my ego has wreaked upon me during the day. I feel like a warrior, staggering home after battle, bloody, beaten, exhausted. But the people who yell at me, push me, demand and cry and manipulate aren't the enemy. My ego is the enemy, and until I let it slay "me", the war will go on.  

And so I choose The Other. A moment here, then there, in the flow of hell in front of my eyes, experience, living. Instead of fighting back, denying, crying, defending, I stop. Go silent, and watch. And I see that there is no wrong, no bad, only Life. And it is All Good. Then I'm back into hell. Then silence again. Then the flames go higher. Then Wallace licks my cheek. Then I'm sobbing at how much pain my body is in. Then the moon is so bright it must be medicine. Then I sense my death coming for me. Then I watch the ants patiently break down the crumb of bread and take it inside their home.  

Spiritual autolysis, gone digital. What else does a human do with eternity other than make art?

Creature From The Cute Lagoon

I understand that mostly what Life is doing right now is hammering away at my ego, keeping anything that I might try and label as 'love', 'safety', 'stability', or, 'fantabulousness' far, far from my living. Which is actually producing a sense of hilarity in me, a surrender to it all that comes complete with belly laughs in recognition that I am so not in control of what's happening, and at the pointlessness of all the striving and organizing and fighting and thinking, those crazy mental machinations that we mistakenly call a life.

Sweet Baby Wallace, with his dueling love of chasing wiggly things and snuggling warm things, is still so dang sick. For whatever reason, his immune system can't kick the virus, and so it blasts at him, his eye swollen, the cornea scarred and opaque with a lesion generated from the rubbing of his third eyelid. His little gums are swollen, bleeding from an auto-immune response to it all, and he continues to have extreme skin reactions to the flea problem that no amount of frontline, flea-maxx, or capstar can stop.

I've logged in close to $400 at the vet so far, including the latest weapon: $120 opthamalic viral eyedrops. The vet wants to do a surgery where they take a flap of eyelid and create a sort of patch over his eye so that it can go all cave-like and possibly heal. But of course, thanks to both The Hoon and his kidney/heart extravaganza, and Jacinta's need to go radioactive, the coffers for state of the art pet medicine is rattling pennies at this point. (You know you are hopelessly in love with your fuzzy guys when you'll drop $2900 on vet visits in four months, but when you need dental care, you spend $10 down at the community college's school clinic.)

The vet's energy changed noticeably when I told her this past Friday morning during our latest visit that I wasn't able to swing the surgery. "He may lose the eye," she said to me. 

I don't tell her that I'm well aware of that particular fact. Or that I understand that the virus is impacting his overall health, longevity, and ability to withstand other illnesses. 

But I'm not unhappy about any of it. I really get what is going on here. That this is Simply The Deal in my living. Death, illness, stress, anguish, yelling, judgment, money stuff, apartment stuff, health stuff. Nothing I can do can stop the flow. And I understand on some level that it's not about stopping it, but finally, finally, seeing through it all, seeing that 'chaos' has no relation to my experience of joyful grateful aliveness.

And so with Baby Wallace I do what I can do, as much as I can. There are three rounds of meds, one by mouth, two that have to be put directly into his eye, twice a day. I bathe his eye with warm saline and clean the gunk out several times a day. I apply salve to his flea-ravaged nether regions. And give him lots of lovin. So much lovin. Chase him around the house with the kitty tease (which is essentially a small fishing pole with a patch of cloth strips at the end). Feed him high quality kitty food. Make sure he has access to an open window for sun and fresh air. Lend him my remaining credit card so that he can go to The Pussy Club for male bonding with other neutered males from the Tom community.

Where the frak did that last sentence come from??? Probably because I'm being all serious and sh*t as I type this, while beside me, Baby Wallace purrs and yawns and looks at me with sparkly kitty love eye(s) and says: yo, life is good, because above all else we're alive, and that is a dang good thing. Then he tucks his nose under his tail, and drifts off to sleep, snoring and purring intermingling with small snot bubbles.

So, really all is well here. Jacinta even let me pick her up last night, and instead of the rottweiler-like growling she usually does these days, she purred, and we had a small love fest, and that was really awesome. 

And last weekend, I caught the two fuzzy weasels in what appeared to be a snuggle, the first time I've ever seen them that close and not engaged in a vicious (her), hardcore punky playful (him) headlock. Their first official snuggle caught on camera:

And here's one of luscious Sweet Baby W, in soft focus for your delicate sensitivities. (I stopped posting pics of him because he's such a mess that he looks a little scary. But cute. Oh lord is he cute. Hence the title of this post. He really is just a cute, snuggly, wiggly, weaselly little fuzz punk.) 

New Year Detox Handout

 . . . is up Here.

If you want an msword version of it (for the checklist at the end, etc.) just drop me an email.

Party on, party peoples, party on, but switch the vino to stanky tea, which I guess isn't much of a party, but it will be once you and your colon and liver and skin stop squabbling. 

(Don't know what stanky tea is? Gotta go check out the detox to find out. Mmmmmmm, good stanky tea . . . mmmmmm. . . )

New Year Detox

I'm teaching a Detox class this Sunday evening at here in lovely Wilmington, aka Wilmaville, aka Willywood. Details can be found Here.

If you aren't local, or can't come, I'll be posting the class handout sometime Sunday (I'm going to be fine-tuning it over the next couple of days). (I can also send it to you as a word doc if you want the checklists, too which I won't be posting online as they are just way too freakin intricate to try and reformat for a post.) 

I don't know about you guys, but I feel like a puffy, achy, toxic mess. I've been eating way more baked goods than I should (gluten-free, but still), and not doing vigorous exercise (energywork and yoga-lite in the morning and running around cubicleland like an over-caffeinated squirrel, but still), and been using a glass (or two) of (lovingly, organically) fermented grape juice as nightly stress management. And in response, my ass, like the universe, has continued to expand, and my liver, pancreas, spleen, and colon have threatened to Get All Medieval on me, and it's making me nervous.

And so, to show my organs some love (heh :), and to prep for the class, I cut myself off from coffee, wine, and baked goods this week. (okay, fine, i'm having a cup of coffee right now, but I'm off from cubicleland today and it's my first cup all week so talk to the paw.)

And, yeah, I'm actually feeling a little better this morning. So, yeah, detox. It ain't just for former child stars . . . 

I Know Kung Fu

I wrote the post of the other night, went in to work the next day, and was confronted by constant, unrelenting hell, all of ego's making. It was an onslaught from the moment I sat down in my cubicle, until the minute I left it. Twice I nearly cried, once I nearly vomited, and continuously I wanted to quit and walk out. What kept me present? Awareness.

Maybe it wasn't abiding, non-dual awareness. Or even supa-groovalicious awareness. But it was enough of a sliver of the real stuff so that I always had at least an inkling of what was really going on. What was going on? Ego: inflating, deflating. Running through it's kung fu moves of attack, defend, the moves it's developed after several decades of practice. Each move one of two flavors. 

One is How to Get More Stuff From the World. This includes such moves as Be Really Sweet, or Be Really Helpless, and folks give you things, be they emotional, mental, or physical in nature. I see this in action at work in myself when I get scared or feel overwhelmed and I'm trying to get a co-worker to give me some of their time, energy, or expertise. I use it on clients to try and get them to stop expressing emotions of fear, anger, or blame that I find uncomfortable to be around. In the moment, the client is telling me of the terrible problems they are facing, and they seem to not understand that my job is simply to pick through through their Official Record to pass things along the conveyor belt of The System, with the end result being cash or no cash. They seem to have no understanding that I don't make decisions, or have any real sort of power. But then again, they are so absorbed in their own dramas that it leaves no energy leftover for any clear seeing, any real discernment for what is actually going on. 

Their bodies are falling apart in the ways that you read about every day, but when you are sitting with a human being wrestling with colon cancer or diabetes, can see it in their skin tone, smell it in their body odor, it takes on a sense of immediacy. Or they have seven kids, the youngest four months old, and the three-year old is playing on the carpet by your feet, the dark rings under their eyes from liver and kidney toxicity revealing their poor diet. Or they are losing their home, and have nowhere to go. Or the love of their life was killed in a car accident, one of the biggest pile-ups in history, and did you hear about it, it was on the news for weeks, and they pull out a picture to show you their lost love, and in the picture she is radiant, gorgeous, and when you look back into his eyes you see that he knows how very dead she is. Or they were swindled out of their savings by fellow regular folks. Or they were swindled out of their job by Corporate Malfeascence, which is really just a bunch of regular folks who organized together to get their Collective Insatiably Voracious Doings declared legal.

Being Smart is also in this collection of kung fu positions, because it's an efficient and currently culturally accepted way to Get Stuff in a back door, an around the side of people's minds and hearts kind of way. Intelligence is something that can be wielded for a lot of purposes, but i've come to see it mostly be used as a finely-pointed manipulation technique, aimed at the minds and hearts of others, a series of chess moves where the loser is tricked into giving up their Stuff, and if the winner is really crafty, it's done in such a way that the loser actually thanks the winner with a smile and a handshake or hug. I see it in myself in how I can kung fu my collection of Facts, my laundry lists of Things I Know, although sometimes it's merely enough to refer to my Master's degree. 

The other flavor of moves is How To Defend From Others As They Try to Take Your Stuff. The ones I see in constant rotation at work are arrogance and rage. When clients are in this space, they see "their money" as being held from them. By me. They see me as a robber, a thief, a cheat, or some other species of predator. And so their own ego-as-predator comes out. And they use it to try and beat the cash out of me. 

The ones I most use are arrogance and blankness. Both of them used in the face of clients wielding their rage or arrogance at me. And it is my use of these two responses that had my entire day descend into hell yesterday. Because yesterday, there was no saying 'yes' to people, my ego did no inflating from the praise from people who are so very happy to hear the word Yes out of my mouth. Yesterday was All No, All Day. Telling person after person that they were being denied, that they were hung up in The System, and that there was nothing, absolutely nothing I could do for them. 

I could tell you story after story about what people said or did to me, but it doesn't really matter. The tipping point for me was when a guy raised his hand high, his motorcycle helmet gleaming in the fluorescents. First, I got that what he wanted was to bring it down onto my skull, hard. Second, I got that he wanted me to know it. But then, he was storming out the door, screaming about how we'd driven him to go rob a bank. 

Then it was time for me to go to lunch. And so I went into the break room to heat up the enchilada casserole I'd brought from home. As I tried to eat, my hands were shaking so badly that I began giggling, in that way that belies the current of hysteria that is running underneath. One of my co-workers sat across from me, and I mentioned what had happened. The Big Cheese was also there eating his lunch and as he is a seriously Not a touchy-feely kind of person, he responded to the physical threat by reminding me about our panic button, how if it happens again, I should hit the panic button, because that is what the panic button is there for, because they killed someone a few towns away who does the same job I do, and now we have the panic button, so I should have pressed it.

I went to tell him how there wasn't time, or about the build up that led to the man considering using his helmet as a club. But it's difficult to explain things to the Big Cheese. Not that he doesn't witness the insanity, but he experiences it in a different way than the rest of us. He is a middle aged white man who reeks of authority, and clients respond much more calmly to middle aged white men as they have been the gate keepers of western society for several hundred years now and folks are deeply conditioned to do as they say. 

But I am also a gate-keeper. Or at least I appear this way to most of the clients. My job is essentially about How To Give People Stuff. But it's a system that picks and chooses who it gives to. There are criteria for yes and no, worthy and not worthy, and degrees of worthiness, with some folks getting a lot of Stuff, and others getting the most paltry sum imaginable. The system of Stuff Distribution is based on the same horrendous set of cultural criteria that you see in motion every day. I don't see a lot of thin, good-looking white people crying in my cubicle.  

And more clearly, every day, I see that we are a culture of slaves. I want to shake the person in front of me, whining about his motorcycle getting repossessed, demanding that I give him money, because how else, he yells, is he going to pay his rent? I want to say: you are an adult, go take care of your sh*t and stop pretending that we are your mommy and daddy who are being mean to you. But I don't say it. Because mentally, emotionally, the man sitting in front of me is a child, a petulant four-year old stuffed into the alcohol and cigarette ravaged body of a 48-year old man. Because we are a culture of slaves, and maybe I'm doing my muthaf*cking best to Wake the F*ck Up, but currently, I am no less a slave than he is.

But I understand that to wake up, my next moves must be about refraining from moving. I understand now about what it means to stand in front of your enemy and lower your shield, to bear your breastbone to the enemy's sword, to reach your hand down to lift the sword's point so that it is aimed right at the heart. Yesterday, I saw how unwilling I am to put down my shield, how the fight is still alive inside of me. Even as I am closer, even as at least I now know what's going, can now See What's Really Happening.

Mostly what I am is afraid. Every time I begin to lower my shields, to stop fighting the rage and arrogance and pain and pathos being directed at me from the folks around me, something kicks in, and it's all I can do not to start screaming, crying. And the few times I've been able to be still, and not fight, the person across from me leans in, and the stench of their body odor, the smell of decay and corruption hits me in a place that registers on a level not just olfactory but primal, and I shut down, go blank. 

Today, I'm off from work. It's New Year's Day, and my resolve is strong to keep at this, to keep showing up. Because tomorrow I go back in to the cubicle, and face more enemies, which are really only myself, wearing different faces, which is why it hurts so much, because I still believe "I'm" real, and "I'm" still afraid to die. Because I still don't feel connection, feel The One. Because the most real thing I feel is World, and it is the least real thing of all . . . 

Kung Fu. I know kung fu. You do too. 

Tell us. Tell us about your kung fu. Begin to set down your own shields by beginning to describe what your shields look like, how you wield them . . . What are your ego's preferred kung fu moves? How effective are they? What is your secret power move, the one that you only bring out when the usual set don't bring about the desired result?