“There are only two emotions, love and fear”
It was circa 2000 when Nadine said those words to me.
Those few words at phrase was paradigm shifting for me because at that time my head was a hard place to inhabit.
I had read voraciously and widely for many years. I loved to debate and I had just emerged from almost 10 years of steeped in Orthodox Jewry and its obsession with intellect and Talmudic wrangling.
For a moment I was free. Life was so exquisitely simple. You are either in a space of love or openness or in a space of fear and contraction.
Fast forward 19 years - it was a great insight but it has not spared me existential pain.
The last two weeks though have been decidedly peaceful and if I were to talk about emergence I would say that I have emerged.
The healing, if I can call it that, has been multi-faceted.
Two elements have been key.
The first is peeling back a layer of understanding around my desire to be seen and heard.
Desire is completely the wrong word. An understanding around how being seen and heard has been essential to my survival and its absence being akin to an experience of being extinguished or more aptly, being discarded.
The second has been my vigilance around the 6 elements practise - I wrote more about it in my post on the hero’s journey (Blog link)
The 6 elements have been key because they encompass an all rounded practice that is both internally and externally focused at the same time.
The internal elements include the meditation practice for example and the external would include the gratitude practice as another.
All work as a virtuous circle and all feed the other but I think it is “working” because of its multi faceted structure.
So the two questions that I am left with are:
1/ Will the sustained practice enable me to find a grounded level of inner peace that enables me to deal inwardly with what life throws at me?
2/ Will the sustained period of peace invariably result in a crash?
None of the practices that I have embarked on are new to me.
What is different this time is that I don’t believe that I have ever made such a deliberate effort to integrate this many practices consistently into my life for a sustained period.
The practises take me almost 14 hours per week to complete so they require commitment, rigour, planning and explanation
I am unclear what word describes them but I am going to call them rocks because what they do is fundamentally ground me and then from a grounded place I have capacity, perspective, context, energy, and patience.
And from that place I can deal with what both my internal and external environments throw at me.
There is some fear, fear that the noises will come knocking, fear that somebody (myself included) will say something or do something that will bring it all crashing down
However, I have started wondering whether perhaps instead of the “crash” being a descent, what if it were an ascent. What if this level completed itself and I moved to the next level and the next level and then the next level. What if this was the access to continually opening.
That would be extraordinary.
And that brings me full circle to the insight that I shared earlier about being seen and heard and the impact going to Highlands had on me.
I walked into that school as a 12 year old boy in January 1984. It was a public school of almost 1000 boys and I along with Jeff Eberlin and Martin Bernstein was amongst the 3 smallest boys in the school.
I was miniscule and irrelevant in that place and like a gnat I could be wiped out with careless flick of a hand across a shoulder.
I knew that viscerally.
To be seen and heard became not just a nice to have. They became my means of survival.
We all have our childhood story (maybe its an inevitable wound) of why we felt irrelevant or needed to make ourselves indispensable to others, needed to be seen, feel important, acknowledged.
The extent of the circle and the number of circles differs between each of us but the fundamental need stays the same.
For the Goths or the queers, or the delinquents, the nafs or the boys who played fairy sticks it was probably one circle wide and the circle probably consisted of four boys but it is where they were seen.
For me the circles were numerous.
I was a leader, I had been popular, I played sport, my fathers business was a household name, I had all the coolest gear, I had a hot girlfriend, I was smart, I had an older cousin, I had backstop.
Whatever those circles were I needed to embed myself within them and have them, the members of each of those circles, see and acknowledge me.
And so that pattern has played out into adulthood.
This craving to be seen and acknowledged as an experience of being relevant, needed, dispensable, generous, capable, needed, wanted, important - all of it determined by others. How powerless is that?
How powerless that I hand my own sense of self to others to decide how relevant I am and even more sinister is that not only do I need them to feel my relevance I need them to state my relevance to ME and to others.
That has got to be destined for wanton destruction and mind-blowing disappointment.
And more than that, I am at the whim of others like a needy dog begging its owner for a snack or a walk.
Am I free of that from this ? have I fallen and then unfallen? Have I accessed an insight and the practices that will embed that insight?
I am not sure.
All I know is that the one constant is change