From Loneliness to Unity

I am feeling a ton of appreciation and gratitude for the profoundly touching, thoughtful, and insightful comments and responses to my last post. My heart vibrates with the knowledge of our deep connectivity, with a feeling of sacredness for our impact on others, no matter how well we know each other, due to the similarity of this human experience.

I find it interesting how different people resonated with various aspects – for some, the broken heart. For others, the alcohol, loneliness, or illness. The inspiration to write what came from a conversation with a friend who expressed that this sense of loneliness and isolation was something she was feeling strongly in the past months and aware of it in many individuals who she would have never imagined in such a way position. We are all human, and we are certainly amidst a strong collective process. As a result, I am inspired to write more. I have been guided and fully believe that my heart expresses itself strongly through the written word.

Returning to last week – As I stewed in what I was calling my story of isolation and aloneness, I noticed some cracks in the foundation. I was in rich connection with so many incredible souls throughout the holidays. I had developed new relationships here at Lake Atitlan and nurtured many long distant connections that have evolved with time. I even connected with an ex-partner, and we spent time reviewing, healing, forgiving, and getting to know the current human on the other side, not the fixed image of a person from ten years ago. And despite all of this, I was clinging to some idea that I was alone and separate. When I took an honest account of this contradiction, a few things emerged. First, not being in contact with my mother over the holidays seemed to impact me significantly. And second, lacking an intimate relationship shortly after a breakup seemingly cast a large shadow over my entire relational field. I am happy to report that my mother and I have spoken and started healing a recent would between us. As for the shadow of no intimate relationship, this has been a deeper and more subtle dive into me, asking myself why such a relationship (or lack thereof) carries such an inordinate amount of weight on my well-being.

I wrote about this recently in a post called the Eden Project. Despite articulating this process and even understanding the source, it’s much harder to shift the habit. In the days after writing this, I made a conscious decision to be utterly sovereign in my sexuality and approach to relationships for a while. And how fleeting that was! Probably within a day or two, I had found myself in some situation where the inner self was asking, what about this one, it’s different, she’s different? Is this the one that may complete the Eden project for me? What a comedy of errors and contradictions I am!

 And what does completion even mean? I was joking with a group of men recently that this desire is like wanting to rest my head on a woman’s chest, have her put her arms around me, tell me I’m perfect, and never have to do anything strenuous for the rest of my life. A return to infancy! Obviously, that is not going to work as a full-time strategy (even though on occasion and at the right moment, that’s one of the best feelings in the world!).

Why am I even writing about any of this? 

I’m noticing how much loneliness is a perception, an idea, a concept that is not often grounded in present moment reality. Some are genuinely isolated and alone due to choices, external conditions, or myriad factors. And they may not feel loneliness! Many do, I am sure. Yet this is not me, nor many of you who are reading this. There are probably 50 people out there, you included who I could text right now asking if we could connect and speak, and within 24 hours, you would be there for me.

As I contemplated this theme, I was also uncovering Richard Rudd’s recordings and serendipitously found and listened to a playlist where he explores how we can transform many of the shadow energies into something lighter, loneliness being one of them. Combining his and my words: When we feel loneliness, we feel cut off from everything from our life source. It doesn’t matter who we are surrounded by or what our life consists of; a part of us believes we are alone in this world. The answer to this dilemma is in the heart. In the heart is warmth. And warmth melts the ice of isolation. So the way to transform loneliness is to go within your own heart, chipping away at the ice every day. When there is enough warmth in the heart, when you are alone geographically, you don’t need to feel alone energetically.

You can go outside, under the stars, see the moon, and see them as alive. The moon is not just a dead rock but has a being-ness. This warm heart and knowing connect us into a unified field, and you can realize that when the heart is open, we can never feel alone. We can be alone but not feel lonely. We feel alone only when the seat has folded in on itself.

Loneliness is an invitation to Unity.

Comments, please:  How do you proceed along the path from Loneliness to Unity?

The Drunkard and the Lover

As I transitioned into the new year, I felt ready to begin anew, to move past some of the grief and loneliness I had been experiencing in the last week of 2021. As if on cue, I was stricken with the flu on the 2nd, which gave me even more time to examine my current state, although this time mostly horizontal, through night sweats and skull-numbing headaches.

I intended to record a video to show up in this weak, raw, and vulnerable moment, but my voice is almost gone, and I am coughing heavily after a few sentences. But rest assured, I will still let you into some of my angst through my words.

It has been a journey into isolation and loneliness the past two weeks – my two closest friends here became unavailable for different reasons, one also succumbing to a severe illness. And while I have made many connections on this lake, I am someone who does not build up depth, trust, and intimacy with people quickly. A stranger in a strange land, the expression goes. In addition, and somewhat ashamedly, I still feel the effects of heartbreak from a couple of months ago. It was a short, intense relationship that pulled on the most profound aspects of my lifelong inner feminine healing process, forcing me to face all the ugly parts of that internal relationship: the betrayal and lack of trust, the dependency and validation, the overemphasis and need for sex and eros and contact. And experience has shown me that this inner feminine, the anima as Carl Jung referred to it, tends to possess the face of my previous beloved. This is very much a work in progress and one that has invited me into a state of pause.

One bright spot in the last week has been my discovery of the contemplations of Richard Rudd: poet, and creator of the Gene Keys system. I specifically found myself listening to an album called The Ecstatics, where Rudd explores the mystical nature of some well-known individuals like Walk Whitman, Ananda Mayi Ma, and Hafez, along with some lesser-known mystics that were new to me.

I have found this series incredibly inspirational, and I was brought back to a time, 10-12 years ago when my life shifted dramatically – I was in my Saturn return (~age 29), I left my comfortable corporate job, sold all of my possessions, discovered zen, yoga, tantra, meditation, and poetry. All things were pouring in and out of me with great ease and joy. AND there was so much that I was utterly unconscious of! And certainly still am. Looking back, I can see and feel that dream of youthful optimism, reaching ecstasy without pain, without suffering, without heartbreak and disappointment. And Rudd sums this up beautifully:

The path of love involves a different kind of suffering from the path of meditation.

The path of love drags us through the world, whores us through the taverns and marketplace. And we will be battered and bruised by it.
But one day, one day we may have the epiphany… that the love on the outside is but a shadow of love on the inside

We who have passed beyond the age of 40 or so, we have learned that all is not what was promised. And even if we find it, it slips through our grasp. It eludes us, and it must do, because love in the phenomenal world is the effect of a deeper love, an acausal love, and this deeper love, this ecstasy is beyond any effects; it does not have a target; it is simply our true nature.

Two small new years resolutions/intentions I have committed to are:

• No alcohol for the first three months
• Drastically reduced use of news and podcasts

Both connect to the ecstatic state referred to above. Both news and alcohol are significant distractions from the inner landscape. And while I have not been abusing alcohol by any means, even moderate amounts are not in the best interest of a human healing his body from serious disease.
Rudd’s exploration of Hafez reminded me that the reason for reaching for alcohol is all too similar to that of reaching for love, except that they end up in drastically different locations. Rudd quotes Indian spiritual master Meher Baba comparing the lover to the drunkard:

The Sufi master poets often compared love with wine. Wine is the most fitting figure for love because both intoxicate. But while wine causes self-forgetfulness, love leads to Self-realization.

The behavior of the drunkard and the lover are similar; each disregards the world’s standards of conduct and each is indifferent to the opinion of the world. But there are worlds of difference between the course and the goal of the two: the one leads to subterranean darkness and denial; the other gives wings to the soul for its flight to freedom.

The drunkenness of the drunkard begins with a glass of wine which elates his spirit and loosens his affections and gives him a new view of life that promises a forgetfulness from his daily worries. He goes on from a glass to two glasses, to a bottle; from companionship to isolation, from forgetfulness to oblivion. Oblivion which in Reality is the Original state of God, but which, with the drunkard, is an empty stupor–and he sleeps in a bed or in a gutter. And he awakens in a dawn of futility, an object of disgust and ridicule to the world.

The lover’s drunkenness begins with a drop of God’s love which makes him forget the world. The more he drinks, the closer he draws to his Beloved, and the more unworthy he feels of the Beloved’s love; and he longs to sacrifice his very life at the Beloved’s feet. He, too, does not know whether he sleeps on a bed or in a gutter, and becomes an object of ridicule to the world; but he rests in bliss, and God the Beloved takes care of his body, and neither the elements nor disease can touch it.

One out of many such lovers sees God face to face. His longing becomes infinite; he is like a fish thrown up on the beach, leaping and squirming to regain the ocean. He sees God everywhere and in everything, but he cannot find the gate of union. The Wine that he drinks turns into Fire in which he continuously burns in blissful agony. And the Fire eventually becomes the Ocean of Infinite Consciousness in which he drowns.

My favorite line is: He, too, does not know whether he sleeps on a bed or in a gutter, and becomes an object of ridicule to the world, but he rests in bliss, and God the Beloved takes care of his body, and neither the elements nor disease can touch it.

Cheers to the path of the lover – willing to love wildly and freely and have my heart broken repeatedly!!!

And the need for the break from news and podcasts is clear to me – I/we are being confronted with a pandemic of fear and isolation and division, and seeking outside solutions and answers and distrusting our inner guidance is only a recipe for more isolation and separation. How much of what I’m feeling is my own making? This topic I will soon explore on its own.

I leave you here for now. In the hour or so it took me to write this, I am feeling physically stronger, emotionally more connected, and overall much lighter.

Thank you for being with me, and I’d love your feedback.

Sabotaging Life

Recently, I’ve observed a pattern that I would like to break. Its in the area of self-sabotage or sabotaging life. I’m trying to get at the root of this, as it’s a behavior that I find incredibly frustrating and corrosive. Some typical examples:

• You spend an incredible evening with your lover, feeling close and full of love, and in the waning moments of the night you make a terribly insensitive comment, seemingly undoing the magic that just unfolded.
• Its Friday night, and rather than go out with your friends you decide to stay at home and reflect in silence. You read a few pages of one of your most inspirational books, and as the last glimmers of sunlight fade into the night you are feeling incredibly open, connected. There is a sense of peace and serenity that you typically don’t find during your busy life. You feel like you’re losing track of time and space- yet before you actually realize what you’re doing, you have your iPhone in front of you and you’re reading some sort of news about some place in the world that serves to do nothing other than take you out of yourself.
• You meet your best friend for lunch, and in typical fashion you jump into an intense conversation about life, dreams, frustrations, fears and aspirations. Your friend provokes your unwillingness to make a career shift, despite your constant complaining of your current situation. You find yourself coming up with excuses, citing the many reasons its not a good time to make change, how there will be a better time in the future. You head back to work, feeling terrible.

I’m sure we can come up with a few more.  Do any of these ring a bell?

What is at the root of these behaviors? I would like to focus mostly on the first two examples which share something in common: A fear of deep intimacy. Whether with another person or with the world (which at some level are the same thing), there is a pulling back from love, a return to the safety of one’s own shell. The insensitive comment or pouring your attention into the iPhone both serve a similar function: providing a separation between you and the world. By drawing this line, our ego can remain comfortable. It no longer has to worry about disappearing in the vastness. It creates clear boundaries between self and other and rests comfortably on its side of the line. On your side of the line, you can hide your vulnerability, you can choose to remain ambivalent to another man’s pain. You can rest comfortably in your own projected world, allowing your body, speech and mind to reinforce this projected world.

Yet what happens when you start to observe the patterns above? You realize that your actions are simply habits that serve to return you to your safety-net and reinforce your projected world of separation. In those deeply intimate moments with your lover or in nature, you can taste an entirely different way of being in this world. Just the thought of maintaining that level of intimacy in all your interactions is overwhelming. Yet why would you not choose this?

This returns me to the original question: How do I break these patterns? I don’t think there’s an easy answer. Developing the witness and noticing the patterns is the first step. Then slowly cultivating the ability to remain, or rest in these new and unknown situations of intimacy is the second.  Which I think also implies living in a way that creates the conditions for intimacy. For me, some of these conditions are: living with a lover, slowing down my pace, meditation and spiritual practice with others, being regularly in nature. Once the edges start to break from these habits, it’s a matter of time, attention and intention for them to dissolve more fully.