Andrew Marc Rowe

Another book review - this time of a classic Arthurian epic poem.

I remember when I first arrived in Peru for my time with ayahuasca ceremony. We Westerners were seated around the shaman, or healer, and we told our stories of woe. By the time it got to me, after hearing some serious tales of psychological distress, I remember feeling somewhat like an impostor. I was just unhappy - I hadn't experienced physical violations of the kind described by some of the others. After each of our stories, the shaman would make a comment on our issues, wh...ich was duly translated from Spanish for us. For me, he said something along the lines of 'self-doubt is a terrible eater of the soul.' As the weeks progressed, I understood why he said that - doubt was at the root of most of my issues. Doubt of myself, reflected outwards as doubt of others, has been a running theme in my life. I got right to work on it when I came back to Peru, though that work fell off at some point. I stopped meditating, I stopped taking care of myself, I stopped doing the things that helped me to deal with my issues on an ongoing basis. This stuff affects our interpersonal relationships. For me, by not continually diving into my shadow side, the doubt returned. In a different form, admittedly, but that is how it works. It is a slippery serpent, the shadow. One that knows you well and how to get past your defences. Before you know it, the thing is back in your driver's seat, making the decisions while you unconsciously assume that control is in your hands. Eckhart Tolle spoke about the pain body, or shadow self, in his book, The Power of Now. It is a miserable thing that is activated in certain situations, and it takes over your consciousness. It spits venom at those whom you love and at yourself. By feeling through the pain, you can sublimate it. That is the work. But there are things that should be beyond doubt, beyond reproach. True love, properly identified beyond mere attachment, is one of them. Doubt that... and you play right back into the monster's grip.

Spend enough time looking inward and you start to see the threads of habit that weave into your present reality. Deeper still and you might start to notice more subtle things at work, things that are both personal and ancestral and nature, pain and suffering that each of us must understand in order to transcend. Pain is a part of life, but it doesn't have to be self-inflicted, and so much of what we do in life is inflict pain on our own selves. Unconsciously, of course. The m...ore you do this kind of work, the more you see that this is the programming that each of us operate within. Compassion is the natural result. The more compassion that wells up, the more our ability to listen to others sharpens. For me, much of my listening ability has hinged on just how little I have been focused on the future. The more I've got expectations at the top of my mind, the less I am able to hear what other people are saying to me. I used to blame myself for this quirk of mine, though now I am far less self-judgmental. In reality as far as I have experienced it, the only thing any of these parts of us want from us is to be heard. By listening to our bodies, we become more practiced at listening to others. And by listening to others, the better we are able to come to understand ourselves. It really is a wonderful system, this give and take. It can bring us closer to one another, foster kindness, and create all kinds of beneficial things for us as human beings and the planet at large. The weirdest thing about living more in the moment is just how toothless reality becomes, not because anything external really changes, but because our natural state of being is to do things 'properly.' It's like the growth of a plant - generally, plants don't 'fuck it up.' And yet, humans do. Humans do things that are completely antithetical to kindness and compassion all the time. And we pay the price for it. But once a certain level of self-understanding is reached, we can settle into growth.

Happy Imbolc! Today marks one of the old pagan holidays, a celebration of spring's approach, halfway between the solstice and the equinox (clearly they didn't come up with this concept in Newfoundland). Still, something felt 'up' this morning when I woke. I was reflecting on the cyclical nature of time on the weekend, how things go up and down and up and down as we go about our lives. The seasons tend to feel sameish to me, with SAD in the wintertime and a feeling a bliss in ...April when spring actually starts to hit, which strikes a fever pitch in summer, and which gets weird in the fall before the celebration of Christmas and the winter hangover to follow. And yet, last year in general and this January in particular threw out all of the 'rules.' Or, perhaps, better put, I grew as person in a pretty significant way. I cried more in the past week than I have in my entire life otherwise, I'm pretty sure. Well, maybe not when I was a kid, but perhaps that's appropriate because I got in touch with my inner child. I used to believe that unhappiness was this unavoidable thing, that it was something that just happens and we have to deal with it. But I think that the truth is closer to that thing we keep hearing from those MFers who some part of us think might be deluding themselves: we get to choose how we feel. That's a cold comfort for anyone stuck in a cycle of depression and elation, a never ending train of ups and downs that we call life. But as far as I have learned, the self is like a computer. Garbage in, garbage out. Kindness in, kindness out. My new mantra is pretty simple: I love you. To myself, from myself. And it's not a lie, either. Nor is it self-deception. I truly love myself, and this is coming from a guy who used to identify with those ubiquitous 'my mind is a miserable cunt' memes that pop up on Facebook from time to time. The next time the internal asshole pops up, just tell them 'I love you.' You might be surprised at where that takes you.

Last year, around this time (the 31st, to be exact), I launched a book called The Yoga of Pain: A Love Story. I'm not going to get into the details of the book (read it yourself ;-)), but suffice it to say that pain and love are intertwined within. And the antidote for pain is discovered to be love by the protagonists. I've come to realize that the dominant cultural programming conflates love with pain. Or at least links the two together. It's almost as if many of us think th...at we cannot have love without pain. That's been my experience, anyway, at a subconscious level. The incessant heartbreak and struggle of personal relationships is nothing more than a war mentality that has survived from our more reptilian days. Mythologically, we in the West are barely removed from Roman conquerors and Norse Vikings, though we measure ourselves 'much evolved' as we try to dominate each other and our environment. We're all mirrors reflecting one another, some more brightly or darkly than others. Ram Dass, riffing on an ode to the devotional god Hanuman, described the spiritual ride as 'polishing the mirror.' Relationships with others are invariably about our relationships with ourselves. We try to get our love from the outside, which is a recipe for pain. There is a font of it within, we've just got to learn to direct it at ourselves and we can start to dissolve the loneliness that we project onto the world and those who surround us. Eventually, we can unhook love from the experience of pain. We can have love without pain, because we lose the expectation of others to provide. If we are the source of the love we crave, what does it matter if someone else does what we want or not? We can learn to simply appreciate them as they are and not take things so personally. Because, like Don Miguel Ruiz taught in his book The Four Agreements, what others do is never about us. You can understand that intellectually, but once that travels from the head to the heart... peace is possible.