Personal Liberation
Who Am I Becoming?
When I was 5 years old I learned how to read. I remember how it felt *not* knowing how to read. The boy sitting next to me, whose name was Dale, was sounding out words and flipping pages. He was telling a story I was pretty sure he did not make up and I was emphatically impressed. Learning how to read was little short of miraculous; a new world of adventure and entertainment opened up, and I fell in love with the lands I visited in books.
Reading was both a pleasure and an escape. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe took me to places that were exciting and safe. But these adventures were also lonely endeavors; only the imaginary accompanied me. When I read alone on the playground during recess, it created schisms with my friends. I solved this problem by adopting a reading buddy, who became my new favorite person. Every Wednesday this lovely, professional grown-up with incredibly straight blonde hair would come to school and read with me during lunch, and I was satisfied. The rest of the time, I played with my friends.
I started meditating my sophomore year of college. If reading saved me from a more painful spiritual childhood, meditation saved me from a more painful spiritual adolescence. There was no idle curiosity or spiritual devotion; I was desperate to stem the tsunami of my thoughts. One evening, I sat myself on the thin carpet of my dorm room floor, and I counted my breath for five minutes. Then, I got into bed and promptly fell asleep. When I woke up in the morning, I realized my mind had indeed been quiet - a gross anomaly!
So I started waking up early to do yoga in the gymnasium, based on some recommendations I googled. I did breathwork practices that promised great yogic abilities if performed correctly. And I meditated next to my bed for five or ten minutes at night, which made falling asleep a breeze. One thing led to another, and meditation became a haven in which beautiful things were possible, like I wrote about in this blog post ten years ago. To discover a beauty within my inner world that was comparable to the books I loved was hope-inspiring; maybe I could live here after all. Maybe I could stop trying to escape and plant a beautiful garden instead. Maybe I could cultivate the wilds of my mind. For a while, meditation was a gentle, calming practice that helped me sleep at night and find peace inside, it became much more.
I meditated daily for years, then twice daily, then daylong, then weeklong, then many weeklongs. In my twenties, ten years after I first sat down to meditate, I was living at a monastery and practicing a LOT. They say that if sitting for long periods of time led to enlightenment, every frog would be a zen master. The point is that frogs are not zen masters, and I spent a lot of time sitting on a cushion. Rather, it is consistent use of a technique (e.g., “focus on your breath”) while sitting that matters. The technique is what your attention does while you sit on the cushion. The use of certain techniques turns the act of sitting (or any other body posture) into a spiritual practice.
Between my mind-calming experiences beside my college dorm bed and my mind-blowing experiences at the monastery, three notable things happened:
My attention (i.e., awareness) detached from my sense of “I” (i.e., self) so that the two could operate independently of each other. “Independently” meant liberally, because there was still a relationship between self and attention. A sense of self could be established where attention was directed.
My sense of self came and went. Sometimes I experienced a sense of self and sometimes there was no sense of self to experience.
The sense of self established by my attentional patterns became less believable. “I” felt like a story rather than a fact.
It felt a lot like getting launched out of a car and landing on the pavement, like this:
This central change in my experience of the world created a radical shift in perspective. “I” was reformatted as if it were a hard drive, albeit a hard drive that didn’t really exist. That was very confusing to confront. The fact of its demonstrated malleablility made “I” less clear cut than I had previously thought. This shattering of the illusion of “I” was the end of one phase of my life, and the beginning of another. Here, too, there is much more that I could say - and I will save it for later (or by request, I will write more).
Integration is what I would call the next five years; a slow and often painful transition from the person I had been to what remained when those layers were worn away. During that time, so much surfaced that I would like to write about: wrestling with suicide, anxiety, depression, and terror; letting go, letting stay, planting seeds, fighting for what was good, fighting to stave off what was not good. Confronting deep fears and deep knowing. Facing the mind patterns that made up my life was really hard work. It was dark and gloomy, although there were also beautiful pockets of light. I made it through - and that is what I am most grateful for.
I’ll write more about what’s coming next - my plans, my hopes, and my aspirations. My north star, my guiding light, is what I’m calling Relational Liberation. It’s how we can be with each other in ways that loosen our own and each others’ relational patterns and bring out strength, love, and wisdom. It’s how we enact mutually liberatory relationships. It’s how we begin to pull ourselves out of the mess of our current social fabric, which runs on a whole lot of fear and shame and rage. It’s how we become willing to show up more fully with each other, because we’re no longer afraid of ourselves - or each other.
Right now, I’m running two weekly groups. Relational Awareness is designed to help you become more aware of the patterns that show up in relation to other people, which will tend to characterize many of the relationships in your life. Relational Cultivation is designed for the practice of new relational patterns - ways you would like to show up with other people, but that feel scary to do because they are new, or because you’re not sure how people will respond. You can learn more and sign up here. I’m also leading the fourth iteration of the Anti-Fragile Heart Retreat this July in Asheville, NC with a team of fellow practitioners. This is a week-long retreat focused on emotional sovereignty and relational practice to cultivate greater joy, openness, and presence. You can learn more and apply here.
What is most important is that you face your own desires and fears, no matter where you are in life. That you are breaking through your own conditioning to live a life that is truly yours. This is a path towards a more beautiful world.
If you’d like to support me in doing this work, there are many ways to do so. You can work with me in groups or one-on-one; you can contribute to my patreon; you can talk to your friends about relational work; you can forward these posts; you can comment on this post or message me with your own experiences, reflections, questions, and ideas. Are there things you’d like me to write about? Let me know.