*

From the time I was a wee slip of a girl, I’ve suffered from searing jealousies so powerful they seemed to bring with them the threat of annihilation. Perhaps there was originally an instinctual element at play: to be neglected or forgotten by one’s caretakers as a completely dependent child, after all, can mean one really doesn’t survive. The underlying fear, anyway, feels that deep and primal. It’s not just run-of-the-mill fear, it’s visceral terror. Inspiring some uneasy nausea to boot. Over this nearly intolerable baseline emotion there’s an equally painful acquired overlay of shame, of self-blame: Why am I not deserving? What fatal flaw do I have that prevents me from mattering?

I can look over my elementary and secondary school years and see how having these emotions percolating in my young psyche created an infinite regress of reactivity, a heightened propensity to take every instance (and later every intimation) of not being the chosen one as a fundamental threat as well as a core criticism. Having my little playmate Caitlin decide she wanted to play with Laura, for instance, rather than with me, felt tantamount at the time to taking out a big eraser and rubbing me off the planet. And that barely even approaches the degree of pain and humiliation I experienced in my teens when my friend Katie was perennially preferred to me by our clean-cut church cohorts. So when my first love started spending quality time with one of my best friends, I looked the other way — dreading but at the same time refusing to entertain the worst. The mere thought was intolerable to me. Of course the inevitable happened, anyway, and I was in such an agony and felt so worthless I wanted to throw myself in the river and drown.

Time and time again I found myself confronting these same overpowering emotions as an adult. Granted, I could have decided to actively avoid situations and people that would bring them up; this is often considered the healthy thing to do. Find friends and lovers who don’t evoke your jealousies or will never do anything that threatens your sense of security. This is what my mother did, I think, in marrying my father. She wanted none of the drama of her parents’ endlessly painful marriage; she longed for safety, and she found it in a partner who would never even do anything unpredictable.

But transcendence can’t come from avoidance. Safety doesn’t necessarily bring about growth. My soul, at least, knew what it wanted. It wanted to face down and even befriend its dreadful green-eyed monster, not lock it in the closet.

I didn’t consciously figure this out until recently. For a long time I blamed myself (as is the trend) for gravitating toward everything and everyone “wrong.” When in fact everything was all right.
*

“If you do not love too much, you do not love enough,” said Blaise Pascal (or so quoth Rob Brezsny), a man so sour on human relations I would have thought him incapable of making such a statement. Women Who Love Too Much: that was a bestseller by Robin Norwood full of cautionary finger-wagging about catering to The Wrong Men. What does it mean to love too much? And are these two talking about the same thing?

I doubt it. Obsessive behavior, groveling, desperation, and tolerance of abuse may be considered manifestations of “love,” as well as misguided efforts to change the other person, but I don’t think that’s what Pascal was talking about. No, it’s something other than the compulsive enslavement to one’s own unresolved emotional dramas and residue that can act as the golden thread, leading one out of the labyrinth of neurosis.

But it takes spools and spools of it.

Byron Katie spins out the gold simply and beautifully in one of her workshops with a participant upset by the interest the man she’s been dating has in another woman.

*

Woman: I want Roger to break up with Francesca…
Katie: Is that true? Go there (laughs). Just a question.
Woman: (Pause) I don’t know.
Katie: Do you care about him?
Woman: (Long pause) Only if he does what I want. (Audience laughter; Katie and the woman start laughing too)
Katie: Is it beginning to make sense why he wants another relationship? (Everyone laughs uproariously)
Woman: (Laughing) No!
Katie: (Laughing) Not at all! You want him to break up with this woman. Is that true? Is that what you want?
Woman: No…I don’t think so.
Katie: So how do you react when you pretend to believe that thought?
Woman: Um…pretty hysterically, pretty dramatically.
Kate: Isn’t it juicy? Don’t you love it? (They laugh)
…

Woman: Roger shouldn’t fall in love with another woman….
Katie: Is that true?
Woman: (Long pause) Mmm…that’s a hard one…(sighs)..God…
Katie: He shouldn’t fall in love with another woman. Can you really know that that’s true?
Woman: No.
Katie: So how do react when you believe that thought?
Woman: Oh…God…I want to kill him. I want to kill myself, actually. (Starts crying softly.)
Katie: (Gently) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really understand this. You know, that’s why I’m a lover of what-is. It’s so painful when I’m not. How do I know he should fall in love with someone else? He does if he does. There’s nothing we can do about it. It is what it is. And where the pain really comes in is, we’re all lovers of reality, we’re just not aware of it yet. We want what is. And the term is unconditional love, you know. I call it just “sanity.”

*
We tell tales, we write stories (often based on our past), and leave out at least half the truth. Radical honesty like Katie’s dismantles that frame, dissipates the plot, allows us to see without those superimposed interpretations. Can we really say we know what’s best? Would we honestly want someone to be with us if it weren’t the right thing for them, or for us?

Freed up, we become more generous with each other. We recover that initial “too-much” love that led us into a full confrontation with our vulnerabilities.

*

When you dive fully into a feeling that’s unpleasant and fear-based, like jealousy, surrendering to the waves, at first it seems like a vast ocean that will drown you. Who would want to swim in that cold, cold water?
‘
But when you don’t actually die, you become curious: what is this I’m feeling, and where did it come from? The emotional reaction always has, for me, had its source in those vulnerabilities from a much earlier time — episodes of humiliation or of being left out (e.g. by Caitlin). Once I’ve really let myself feel the original dramas, the ancient terror and the shame, I find that the present becomes much less overwhelming and much clearer. Now is not then, and you are not my daddy. What I am so desperate for is back there, on the playground. The nightmare fades in the light of day, and I see you for the first time.

Taking the emotional charge off whatever is happening, de-personalizing it, I can look at everyone involved as themselves rather than as characters in my tragic story. I can better see their own fears and their own needs, and feel compassion toward their own situations. Seeing them, I can relate to them as something other than my highly charged and unresolved projections.

Like anyone, they just want happiness, after all, an end to fear, and to be loved. Single mothers may worry whether they’ll be able to provide for their children, and if they’ll grow old alone. Other women may struggle with their weight and a cultural image of beauty that largely excludes them. Still others may hide beneath independence and a brassy exterior a deep woundedness. A man, for his part, may fear for his freedom and yearn for a greater purpose — unsure, perhaps, what any further entanglements will cost him (emotionally and otherwise) and whether he is viewed as a mere commodity.

Relieved of my intense vulnerability, I find that I want them all to be happy, not to be afraid, and to feel loved.

I want the man to feel free…as free as my overwhelming love for him is. I want him to live his adventure, whether or not I ever get to caress his beautiful loins again. How do I know he should fall in love with someone else? He does if he does. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can only bless him, and wish for the best outcome for everyone. This “sublime generosity” (Rumi) wells me up until I’m full from the inside out.

The next time I dive into jealousy, I find that I am only swimming in a pond.

*
The common wisdom is to contract rather than to expand, to protect against further triggering of old pain. Reject those who seem so much as inclined to reject you. Don’t go there! Don’t let it happen again! But I consider turning around and walking toward my demons to be a spiritual practice. Once again I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke:

And if we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle that tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

My green-eyed monster is only a very scared and hurt little girl inside me who needs my love and compassion. And the wolves and sirens and pirates that appear to threaten me in others are, at heart, just other small girls and boys trying to find their way the best way they know how. There is no dragon. There are no bad guys. There is only us.

Happy New Year, everyone. May you transform all your dragons.

This sensation, achingly poignant and at the same time broader than the Atlantic, had been a touchstone of identity for me since my teen years, when I traded smug religious certainty for a sort of tragic-romantic existentialism. Namely, that worldview in which the noble speck of a human creates fragile monuments to him or herself in a vast and indifferent universe, pushing the stone up the hill over and over again, attempting to seize the fleeting day, and raging, raging, raging, against the dying of the light….you get the drift. Pretty much a no-win situation, which Camus and Thomas, among a multitude of other modern and postmodern artists, apparently considered hard reality.

Some precepts of this philosophy’s sobering conclusions are that you are utterly separate and painfully alone in the world, and that you have one brief and all too destructible life in which to try to achieve your desires and connect with other humans, against stiff odds. This lends a terrible urgency and weight to the undertaking of relationships as well as ambitions. This is all there is. The beauty of the flower, or the girl, belongs only to that flower or that girl — so pluck it! Pluck it as though you could save it for yourself and press it like a leaf between the pages of a book. In a world of only form, one loves only form, the particulars and acqusitions of an individual life that are as ephemeral as individual blades of grass. You love her delicate profile and her fondness for Vonnegut novels and her collection of vintage Bebop on vinyl. But is that the totality of what she is, really? What about when she ages, changes, gets Alzheimer’s? Ultimately, in such a world, everything you love is lost, like piles of old letters thrown in the dumpster by unsentimental relatives.

**

My aforementioned stay in New Mexico came after a turbulent and perilous year. The witty but darkly pessimistic boy I felt destined to “save” (inasmuch as anyone can be “saved” within that fatal paradigm), a lanky Argentinian actor with beautiful green eyes who turned me on to Depeche Mode and Christina Rossetti, decided he would rather rescue my endangered princess of a friend from the dragon of her controlling boyfriend than continue to be the center of my universe. Bereft of his adored particulars, his unique tale of woe and his sensual lips (as well as my life’s mission), all seemed lost, and I nearly threw myself in the river that ran behind our college campus.

I did not, however, and by school year’s end had decided upon a radical change of scenery to cleanse my emotional palate. I went to Santa Fe to live with a friend and make cappuccinos for affluent tourists and artists. But in that arty community there was still much to stimulate that pressing sense of ephemerality, that deep, ineffable longing. (No one had yet heard of Ani DiFranco, but another unknown, a young African-American Tufts graduate named Tracy Chapman, provided the plaintive soundtrack to our summer, strumming an acoustic guitar and cataloguing a host of hopes deferred.) The stark landscape emphasized my smallness in relation to earth and sky, while the art spoke to me of striving toward things that seemed perennially just out of reach, like beauty, ecstasy, knowing fully and being fully known, timelessness, completeness, belonging. This longing was never without an object — I always thought of someone specific, and always with a pang of if only. If only X and I could be together in perfect harmony, then maybe we could create a green oasis of consummate joy in this desert of boundless loneliness and certain death, and all the secrets of the universe could finally be revealed. (A tall order, yes, but it’s the “irrational” part of us that makes the wishes!) When my friend and I drove back across the country at summer’s end, I was already driving back toward someone. (Needless to say, that didn’t turn out in my favor either.)

**

I realized, in feeling those pangs of longing again, that I’d strayed from it for quite a while — intentionally. It used to be an integral part of what I thought of as my identity. What happened?

**

The shift had been slight, but it was the kind of slight shift that when made by tectonic plates on the ocean floor creates tidal waves in Indonesia. It started when I began to actually listen to those who had had “waking up” experiences that were all very similar. People who had broken down and broken through. I began to listen, because I was breaking down too. The things I had told myself about the world and other people for so many years had left me with little but layered accumulations of increasingly unbearable pain and grief. I was on the brink of losing it.

Of course, sometimes you have to lose the world in order to gain your own soul.

What I discovered that these people had in common was a fundamental experience of consciousness as the awareness of the seamless oneness of all that exists (which is true on a molecular level, anyway, we’re swimming in an atomic soup), and the conviction that all suffering begins and ends with oneself, i.e. one’s reactions and judgments. (Even Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl argued for that kind of choice.) They also possessed the deep calm of the assurance of indestructability, a sort of non-rational knowing that they had (enviably) experienced firsthand.

As I began to afford them the benefit of the doubt, I began to afford more trust to my own perceptions and intuitions of what might exist beyond the surface forms of things. For the first time in my life, I was able to start to separate my observing consciousness from my repetitive and mostly unoriginal thinking, the running (and rather depressing) narrative called What My F-ing Life Is All About. It was freeing to approach whatever presented itself without that precious backstory, that complicated personal mythology. Almost gleefully, I tossed out loads of junk and stacks of papers, acquisitions I had been holding on to for decades. At the same time I noticed that, within those external and changeable particulars to which I always become so attached in people, there inhered something that felt eternal in a very immediate way, a sort of luminescent presence too bright to be extinguished. Within myself I felt a powerful response, something greater than my pain, my frustrated longings, and even my perfectly reasonable fears. With these discoveries came a peace and a reassurance that could be articulated as nothing you truly love will ever die along with your love will never truly die.

I would never have thought that being so “irrational” would lead me to a place of far greater sanity.

**

Within my longtime worldview, as I mentioned, almost every challenge or risk felt impossibly heavy and deadly serious, not to mention full of hazards. Everyday disappointments took on the gravitas of irreversible loss; urgent attempts at achievement or connection gave way to inconsolable grief. What an awful burden I placed on the souls whose cooperation I required for my fulfillment! Is any wonder that my poor actor opted out of trying to fill the role of my Purpose and Salvation in life? No mere mortal with a belly button and a butt-hole should have to shoulder such a yoke. Nor should he have to support a dependency so dire that a sudden withdrawal of the needed “supply” could result in blinding hatred or suicidal rage. Yet I demanded this of more than a few hapless individuals, and — surprise, surprise! — every last one fled.

**

The “awakened ones” said: your happiness can’t depend upon what anyone else does, because you have no control over what anyone else does. Find the places where you react, and inquire. What’s really going on here? Where am I wounded? Where am I lying? Looking deeply this way removes the clouds of self-deception from your heart, and uncovers the sun that shines perennially underneath, the radiance of unconditional love. (For one example of such an inquiry, you can read about Byron Katie’s Four Questions in this past post.) When you’re not trying to control other people, and not resisting the way things are, you naturally return to your original state of well-being, and are able to act in a manner mindful of theirs as well.

This made an astonishing amount of sense. That so-called radiance was the “something greater” I started to strengthen inside myself by refraining from doing the rational, usual thing and following the dictates of fear and self-preservation. By following their lead and delving inquisitively into my own reactions and projections instead of withdrawing from situations that cause me pain, I’ve begun to bring to light a great deal of unconscious behavior in myself, fundamentally shifted my orientation to the world, and opened up to greater generosity and lovingkindness. (Spiritually sensitive people frequently tell me I actually “look brighter.”) When I look at what passes for common sense about interpersonal relationships in the popular books and media, I wonder if we haven’t severely limited our experience and growth out of a short-sighted unwillingness to go through the discomfort of embracing something other than what we’d had in mind. It’s easier, I think, to blame others for their inconsiderate freedom (the nerve of some people!), and shut ourselves down, shut out the contradictory noise that refuses to arrange itself into our pre-written symphony.

Maybe it sucks to not get your way. But maybe it’s not “the soil falling over your head,” either. Is this all there is? What if there’s more to what-is than you think there is?

**

Those more enlightened than I would say that to directly access the numinous (or divine, depending on who you’re talking to) and to feel the resultant wholeness removes the sense of separation that creates the longing for it. All I know is that for most of my life I stood in art galleries and museums feeling like I was missing something. These days what I’m missing, more often than not, is the feeling of missing something.

I’d like to think that’s progress.

If he hadn’t died almost fifty years ago in a plane crash regarded as suspect by investigators as notable as bishop Desmond Tutu, and had lived to see the new millennium, Dag Hammarskjöld would be 103 years old today.

Best known as a cold-war era U.N. Secretary-General with a Carter-esque gift for diplomacy (he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously), Hammarskjöld kept a journal that was published after his death and has since become a minor classic of Christian mysticism. Poet and translator W.H. Auden said of the book, Markings,

The overall impression which the book makes (is) the conviction when one has finished it that one has had the privilege of being in contact with a good, great, and lovable man.

*

I picked up the book more than ten years ago, when I was working in an independent bookstore as the buyer for the psychology and religion sections. Hammarskjöld’s style immediately struck me as poetic, aphoristic, and epigrammatic, much like Nietzsche’s – but his content differs wildly from the latter author’s, at least in its conclusions. A reader can find that same sense of special-ness, that same narrator’s perspective of being set apart from others (by reason of superior sensitivity or intelligence), but Hammarskjöld seeks to diminish rather than cultivate his considerable ego. I can’t imagine Nietzsche writing the following:

Your ego-love doesn’t bloom unless it is sheltered. The rules are simple: don’t commit yourself to anyone and, therefore, don’t allow anyone to come close to you. Simple — and fateful. Its efforts to shelter its love create a ring of cold around the Ego which slowly eats its way inwards toward your core.

And here, in a dark moment of unqualified misanthropy that reads more like Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, he is thoroughly candid and doesn’t flatter himself:

At any rate, your contempt for your fellow human beings does not prevent you, with a well-guarded self-respect, from trying to win their respect.

But it is probably reflections like these (which mirror the essence of other spiritual traditions like Buddhism) that earned him the appellation of mystic:

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is — is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything.

On being present:

The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, contents which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them.

And, on one of my favorite themes lately, nonresistance:

What must come to pass, should come to pass. Within the limits of that must, therefore, you are invulnerable.

*

It’s worth mentioning that, thanks to his journal, we now know that Hammarskjöld also composed lyrical, imagistic modern poetry that translates beautifully from Swedish.

The breaking wave
And the muscle as it contracts
Obey the same law.

An austere line
Gathers the body’s play of strength
In a bold balance.

Shall my soul meet
This curve, as a bend in the road
On her way to form?

(His undergraduate degree had been a humanities degree, specializing in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Herman Hesse.)

*

Little is known about the details of Hammarskjöld’s personal life. He never married, or even publicly courted anyone, and the openly gay Auden always believed him to be a closet case. But there is no evidence to either support or refute this. What can clearly be divined from his writings is that his heart’s desires were, for some reason, decisively thwarted. As with our friend Kierkegaard, however, this particular form of suffering seemed to contribute greatly to his spiritual development and lead him to some of his more profound insights.

“Perhaps a great love is never returned,” he writes. “Had it been given warmth and shelter by its counterpart in the Other, perhaps it would have been hindered from ever growing to maturity.” Instead of getting caught up in the cycles of need, demand, and preoccupation with physical and psychological gratifications that can dominate even the best of relationships, Hammarskjöld arrives at observations like this:

Our incurable instinct to acquire — to assimilate in the crudest sense of the word — provides the medium for much of our aesthetic experience. Like the mountain troll who wants to eat the princess over and over again — only over again to have the experience of being just a mountain troll. We pick the flower. We press body against body — bringing to nought that human beauty which is only physical in that the surfaces of the body are animated by a spirit inaccessable to human touch.

Hammarskjöld understands the underlying hunger — that the desire to possess derives from a sense of spiritual incompleteness. He also comes to a realization that could quite easily have been written by Osho or Krishnamurti or even Eckhart Tolle:

When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When love has matured and, through a dissolution of self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.

*

Dag nabbed it, all right. I’d like to think that in that moment when his small aircraft smashed into a Congolese jungle, he dissolved into a final radiance, and became one with everything he longed for.

As a husband embraces his wife’s body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high light of the morning.

I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no — but refreshed, rested — while waiting.

Happy Birthday to a beautiful soul, and one of my great and beloved teachers.

In short, I just plain violated myself. I went right back to the early belief that I needed serious fixing, and that forcible change was indeed warranted — no matter how bad it might feel to me. As if I were an out-of-control teenager about to be sent to one of those dubious military-style “boot camps.” Kicking and screaming.

If you read my last post, which was actually inspired by an entirely different situation, you know how susceptible I am to this sort of thinking. Especially when the message seems to be coming from a highly esteemed source.

I was feeling particularly miserable one day in particular when nothing could shake me out of my funk — not an hour of meditation, not a yoga class with a fun instructor, not a pleasant chat with a friend. Everything felt like a losing struggle. I found out, through a person in the know, that I’d gotten someone important an inferior gift thanks to my own cluelessness. I felt like crying over that. Soon afterward, my dinner companion called to say that she couldn’t pick me up, and I had been counting on the ride, as my old beetle wasn’t running well. This just added to my growing feeling of defeat. Once I decided to ride my bike to our rendezvous, thunderheads moved in, seemingly out of nowhere, and it started to pour. Literally pour. I stood looking at the sheets of rain coming down hard, and I gave up. And then I started to laugh. Who can argue with the rain? A crazy person, maybe?

But wasn’t that what I had been doing? Fighting with the is-ness of things, including my very own state of being?

**

After my conversation with my mentor, I had picked up a book by Esther and Jerry Hicks, or Abraham, if that’s what their disembodied friends want to be called. (They’re sort of the grandparents of the popular manifestation movement, which was more or less appropriated by everyone else.) I was seeking some sort of radical faith injection, or at least some relief from my suffering, and headed straight for the woo-wooiest section of the library to browse. I felt too wounded to be proud. The book’s title, The Astonishing Power of Emotions, caught my eye. What would these folk have to say, I wondered, about my feeling so completely shitty?

A lot, as it turned out.

The authors introduce the metaphor of the natural flow of our (timeless, inner) beings as a river and our (finite, physical) selves as being in a boat on that river. Our thoughts may be either upstream thoughts or downstream thoughts, paddling our boats furiously against the current or letting it carry us where our true selves want to go. Our feelings function as indicators of which way we’re headed. “Upstream” thoughts are stressful, and create greater unhappiness; “downstream” thoughts bring a sense of peace and well-being. “Nothing you want is upstream,” they write.

All of which struck this skeptical sculler as brilliant.

“So we beat on,” ends a book widely considered to be the Great American Novel, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Such poetic and melancholy words, penned by an alcoholic after a devastating world war. Fitzgerald’s tragic hero seeks to gain control of the present in order to recreate the past. Given our national myths about hard work and struggle, and our quest for global control, perhaps it’s only American to row against the natural flow of things — and make ourselves unhappy.

The one teaching of Eckhart Tolle that got my attention more than any other was what he had to say about resistance and allowing. In a nutshell: in saying no to what already is, we only create greater unhappiness for ourselves, and act, or more accurately react, from a place of negativity. If we can embrace whatever the present moment brings, we allow ourselves greater peace of mind and are able to act more effectively. I thought of Tolle again recently when I reached the end of Herman Hesse’s classic Siddhartha, where the restless protagonist finally learns exactly this sort of allowing and presence from his close association with a river.

So now here were Esther and Jerry, and all their invisible playmates, advocating relaxing into our natural state of well-being by “letting go of the oars” and being carried by the current of our being. According to them, everything that feels bad indicates resistance, or paddling against the current, including my own raging frustration, impatience, anger and hopelessness. “The belief that there is something to overcome points you upstream,” they say. Any sort of urgency, the feeling of needing to get “there” right now indicates some kind of pushing-against, is a red flag for an “upstream thought.”

My forced attempts to entertain an entirely different vision for myself upon (what I experienced as) someone else’s prodding were giving me a case of rower’s hernia. I was going strenuously against the flow of my own inner current. What was needed here, as the authors advised, was surrender — even though I was impatient to get somewhere. (In retrospect, it was perhaps this impatience that infected my friend and prompted his frustrated response on my behalf.) “I am where I am, and it’s okay,” to borrow a mantra from the end of the book. If I could just quit struggling, my boat would naturally turn around and float downstream, and I’d wind up somewhere — somewhere, if you take the authors’ word for it, I’d want to be.

You must find a way to feel good now, where you are, they reminded me. You can’t wait for a change in circumstances or other people to make you happy. (So basic, yes, but how do I keep missing it?) Decide how you want to feel and then figure out a way to feel that way regardless of what’s happening. Improvements occur externally when your internal landscape changes for the better. (Tolle said as much, too.)

**

The sudden downpour that day made things very easy, and very clear, in a way that other circumstances often don’t. Here was the rain; what now? I’m sure I could have remained resentful and resistant about the day’s unexpected twists and my crappy mood for hours, and made a pretty abysmal dinner companion for my poor friend. As it was, I laughed, and quit wishing for different weather, and took the g-damn car anyway.

By the time I got to our meeting place, the sun was coming back out.

I was glad everyone else’s eyes were closed. These weren’t tears of joy or even of release. The teacher had been extemporizing, during our meditation, about “ease” and “bliss” — two concepts from which I had felt increasingly alienated as the days and weeks went by.

What’s the matter with me? My practice was no longer a source of renewal, but just one more source of anguish. Why can’t I get there? It seemed I was once again in the unhappy position in which I had found myself as a teenager involved in a born-again Christian church: those around me constantly testified to the miracles of their “faith,” while I simply sweated from effort. What am I doing wrong?

This was a perennial and exhausting question in my life. Driven by that question, I had gotten an undergraduate degree in philosophy, pored over psychology and world religion texts independently, done years of therapy, given any number of self-help and spiritual gurus a fair shake, taken up meditation eight years ago and yoga five years ago — and still nothing had “fixed” me. I was in emotional pain, stymied in my life direction, conspicuously single, uninsured and underemployed, awash in self-doubt, and furious with the limitations of my aging size-fourteen body, which had hit a ceiling in terms of its strength and flexibility and had started to break down with chronic injuries. It was clear I was not going to become a yoga superstar. I couldn’t keep up with all the toned and agile acrobats, dewy with health, who surrounded me in class. (I added to my suffering by fretting that this greatly diminished my sexual capital; if I couldn’t twist myself into a pretzel — and make like Cirque du Soleil in the bedroom — what possible hope was there for me among all these Amazons?)

I felt that I had, in fact, turned out to be a failure in everything I set out to do.

My yoga-community friends had by that time become wildly enamored of The Secret, a movie that, as I may have mentioned before, asserts that all we have to do to get what we want is to believe, consistently, with visualization and focus, that we will have it. This is also known as the Law of Attraction. I too had seen this movie, and it had made me want to have nothing so much as a screaming fit.

I protested (though arguing with true believers proved pointless) that I had persisted, despite obstacles, through more than a few situations in my life, trying to keep the faith when I hit a wall, wasting years envisioning outcomes that never manifested, time and time again. By the logic of the film, of course, the failure is your fault — you didn’t believe enough. You let doubt and negativity creep in. Or perhaps you wanted something that was wrong for you. (This is also, by the way, the logic of the born-agains regarding unanswered prayers.)

My failures, my fault. These elements together began to spin themselves into one great infinite regress of self-criticism and self-blame. It wasn’t that these strategies didn’t work for me; it was me that didn’t work. If I weren’t so flawed, wounded, needy, deluded…if I “loved myself,” I would want for nothing. If I were properly connected to the ever-elusive Divine, God, the Source, I would no longer do or want the “wrong” thing. If I were healed and whole and perfect, my life would simply tidy up, stop hurting, and I could get on with it, for crying out loud!

I didn’t see the comical irony of flogging myself with this whip, all the while shouting “Heal! Heal! Why can’t you just love yourself?!!” As my shame about my perceived flaws became more acute, I sought out more and more external input, mistrusting the directives of my own heart and intuition and ignoring my internal compass. Not coincidentally, I became severely depressed and started to suffer headaches, insomnia, migraines, and painful abdominal cramps. Eventually I even caught pneumonia. This was all-out war. Rejection on a grand scale of everything and everyone I was in my current state, with all her inglorious pain and confusion and yearning and need.

Maybe there is such a thing as grace, but if so, it seems to be much subtler in my life than in that of my former Christian cohorts and fellow yogis. Someone had left a copy of The Marriage of Sex and Spirit at the front desk of the studio where I work part-time, and in it was an essay by San Francisco psychotherapist and writer Janna Wissler. Reading her wonderful essay, I broke down like a bullied child in her mother’s arms. With her beautiful, compassionate prose, she gave me permission to be who I was, where I was, in all my hurt and craving and apparent lack of enlightenment. She mentioned the practice of sitting in the fire, patiently — Calcinatio — when whatever we want, right or wrong, is frustrated. “Suffer the burning of your refining defeats,” she advised.

I had surely, I thought, had my share of refining defeats.

But what if that were really OK?

What if “bliss” had nothing to do with a destination or a pinnacle one reached by doing it right and hitting the jackpot, or leaving this sorry world behind, but were instead the result of being true and present to one’s deeply felt, if imperfect, experience? Follow your bliss, Joseph Campbell said, and he sure didn’t spend his life fasting on a mountaintop.

Many gurus and religious teachings give innumerable prescriptions and instructions. Do this, don’t do this, don’t eat that, practice this chant or exercise for two, four, even six hours a day. Then maybe, just maybe, after ten years of standing on your head, you might just see a glimmer of a shadow of the Truth, and the Secrets of the Universe may show a little petticoat. This reminds me of Christian conservatives who don’t want anybody to get a free lunch (dammit). You’ve got to work hard (“the way we did in my day”) to get yours. That’s why they love the Old Testament so much, with all its blood sacrifices and its plagues and its confusing and conflicting laws about not touching your pregnant wife with your left hand on a Tuesday.

But then there are the Tolles and the Krishnamurtis and the Nhat Hanhs who say that the Kingdom of Heaven is all right here, right now, and available to everyone. If we could just quit being so distracted.

A wonderful healer I have the privilege to know, a woman who frequently demonstrates an uncanny sort of psychic ability, stopped in her tracks the other day to gaze deeply into my eyes.

“You are perfect,” she said emphatically, “just as you are.” I crumbled like a cupcake. What a concept — not to have to struggle, not to have to try so hard, because everything is exactly as it should be. Because there is nothing wrong with me.

So what if I don’t have much in the bank? So what if I don’t know what I’m going to do next? So what if I’m not bow-chicka-bow-wow-ing with my madly beloved every night (in “reverse cowgirl”)? So what if I’m not seeing visions of the holy mother in my oatmeal? So what if I can’t do handstands or side crow or scorpion? So what?

Chicken butt.

(At least I think that’s what the Buddha said.)

I had been reading a book by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron — When Things Fall Apart, or was it The Wisdom of No Escape? — and some subatomic particle of wisdom must have penetrated my hard head. I remember walking down the street on a sunny day, lost in my usual obsessive and negative thoughts — why me, why me? — when suddenly, for no apparent reason, I looked up at the blue sky and thought, I am not that important.

All at once my anxiety dispersed, as if by magic. For several hours thereafter I remained in a state of calm and (dare I say it?) peace.

This was wholly counter-intuitive. I grew up in America, dammit, land of Davy Crockett and Horatio Alger and libertarianism. Isn’t the individual the measure of all things? Isn’t the whole point of life to distinguish ourselves from the herd, and to get our piece of the apple pie? Or to make it onto the cover of People magazine?

And then there was my upbringing in evangelical Christianity, which teaches us twice-born kids from birth that we’re so very special, our separate, unique little godfearing selves are so utterly important to our Heavenly Father, that He sent His Only Son just to die on our behalf so that our disembodied personalities wouldn’t fry eternally in the lake of fire with the godless heathens (who aren’t very special at all, apparently. Unless you’re a missionary or something).

Add to that some accelerated early learning — I was labeled as a “gifted” child, and did schoolwork two grades ahead for the first several of my elementary years — and, presto! you have a recipe for borderline megalomania. If Americans are superior to the rest of the world’s citizens, and Christians are superior to the legions of nonbelievers populating this evil planet, and “gifted” children are superior to their idiot classmates who do age-appropriate work, then I was la creme de la creme. I was Supergirl. I was way more important than you, you poor slob.

Thus I started off my life journey completely identified with things that made me “special.” Things that made me need to guard my turf, to oppose, to compete. Things that could be taken away from me at a moment’s notice.

And that’s exactly what happened. Other kids surpassed me in school. My ossified faith crumbled to ashes. I failed to make money or headlines, to pull myself up by my red-white-and-blue bootstraps. My self-esteem took a nosedive. The flip side of grandiosity, after all, is inferiority.

Eastern faith traditions like Buddhism (as well as modern mystics like Eckhart Tolle) recognize all of this as the activity of the ego, the constructed self that strives to maintain the illusion of separateness. It feeds on feelings of personal importance, and thrives on grievances and the need to be right. Anything that strengthens that sense of individual special-ness or better-ness is good, to the ego. Unfortunately, its constant internal monologues can create a monstrous tunnel vision, eliminating all perspective and sense of proportion. Ego concerns can dominate a person’s entire consciousness, to the exclusion of anything and everything else that might be going on.

Case in point: there I was, on a beautiful summer day, obsessing and ruminating miserably about my past and all its repetitive, seemingly insurmountable failures. For me, the sky may as well have been pitch black and raining down hailstones. Consumed by despair, I think I was actually contemplating suicide.

And then, the miraculous thought: I am not that important.

In that moment, my massive, dark, bloated, all-consuming ego deflated like a stuck balloon.

The pressure was off. Pressure to live up to expectations, whether they were my family’s or my peers’ or my own; pressure to do something, for god’s sake, and get it right; pressure to solve the never-ending and intractable problem of AlienBaby. Was the earth going to stop turning on its axis if I didn’t get my act together? Who the hell did I think I was?!

All those frenzied thoughts, all their well-worn circuits of self-blame and self-pity, just ceased. I had obliterated their underlying operating assumption. If my strictly individual concerns and desires and achievements really weren’t the be-all end-all in the grand scheme of things, then why expend so much energy? Why create so much distress?

It was radical, to me, coming from where I came from. It was a relief.

…

Many times since, personal importance, the labored machinations of my overactive ego, have more often that not been the prime culprit when I’ve fallen into the heavy quicksand of depression and the sticky sinkholes of despair.

If you’re like me, you may find that when you don’t get the job, the promotion, the coveted affection and attention of a certain person, your sense of specialness is mortally affronted. Why haven’t I “won?” And who, then, is the superior candidate? What often doesn’t help matters is that your friends, relatives, and colleagues, who care about you and have your best interests at heart, may collaborate with your ego and encourage you to think that you deserve X more than someone else because you are better. (Your fear, of course, is that you are worse!) How many times have we sat over coffee with friends, bemoaning the phony bastard who sucked up to the boss or the shallow bitch who got the guy? There would be no plot to most romantic comedies were it not for this need for somebody (e.g. the sweet underdog suitor) to be “better.” Professional sports franchises might likewise languish and go out of business without the fierce identification of fans with a team they believe is superior to all others. (I’m not saying people wouldn’t still enjoy the game, but the more fanatical manifestations of such identification would have no impetus.)

Let’s be frank: a rather nerve-wracking ego investment in being Number One is ingrained deeply into our collective American psyche (USA! USA!), and no one ever wants to be the “loser.”

But the game theme is perhaps a good one to stick with. Some of the more (to my mind) “enlightened” individuals on our planet, like Tolle, author Don Miguel Ruiz, and the wonderful Roz and Ben Zander, have suggested in one way or another that everything in life can and should be treated as a game, albeit not a high-stakes one. (I think my new friend Pablo would say the same.) Their focus is upon gentle experimentation and lighthearted play, upon the appreciation of the richness, texture, and variety of all that exists on the “game board” of life, rather than an attachment to getting some nifty prize in the end. Engagement, to these seemingly happier souls, is much more vital than outcome.

Within this alternate framework, we might start to loosen the clenched fists of ego, of our own personal importance and our need to win, thereby becoming more capable of holding gently and then releasing whatever cards the present moment deals us. We could perhaps enjoy the game of life, without taking it all so personally.

Playing this way would require of us greater patience, kindness, and awareness. Unlike our usual games, this one presupposes cooperation rather than competition.

But anyone and everyone could play, if they were willing to take off their platform shoes.