It Is I Who Must Begin
- Vaclav Havel

It is I who must begin
Once I begin, once I try –
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches
and ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
– to live in harmony
with the “voice of Being,” as I
understand it within myself
– as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road.

Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.

The winds are demanding today, unapologetically mischievous with the chimes as well as the delicate ribbons which dance seductively on the windows, warning the birds of certain death should their flightpath be fooled by false reflection. Running this morning was its customary magic, though it always seems fresh. Funny how an experience is born brand new and yet carries a scent of familiar, like a friend you’re meeting for the first time. That’s life now.

Time is disappearing. Space is altered. The known is new. The knowing is eternal. The character, Martha, who once stood at the center of a life is becoming flimsy, filmy, insubstantial and faltering. There are still toilets in need of repair, cracked egg yolks, disappointments and deaths. Indeed, there’s still an ugly RV parked in my front yard. All of these events which once were cause for tension and attempts at control are now shining proof of the nature of reality: all appearances fade, the nature of form is the rupturing of existence and the swallowing of life back into itself.

Walking in the familiar woods yesterday, feeling how letting go, the leap into fear is the flight to liberation. Whatever experiences the seemingly separate and illusory character contracts away from – aloneness, abandonment, rejection, loss, pain, emptiness, vulnerability, whatever – shapes the bars of a self-created, self-imagined prison. The gift of fear is the ringing of bells, inviting the false self to its death and welcoming the true self home.

In the cage of fear, the imagined, separate self is starved for genuine aliveness and looks to the objects of the world for sustenance, frequently lost between malnutrition and gluttony. This illusory character, regardless of its apparent strengths or insights, is a prisoner unto itself. There is no salvation for the fiction of being. There is only truth and truth requires the abandonment of all comforts, all false securities. Truth demands the rejection of all other suitors. There is no lasting peace, no lasting happiness for the self whose essence breeds in the darkness of ignorance, fearing its survival, starved for a taste of life.

At home, as home, pure awareness shaping itself in infinite and eternal experience, knows its limitlessness and its essential invulnerability. Living becomes infused with aliveness. Experience shines with uncompromising possibility.

I connected with a friend today about the challenge she feels surrounded by our cultural insanity. She finds herself drowning in the upset and fear of people angry and churning about the political situation in the United States and its potential fallout. “It’s madness. Why are people doing this?” They’re starving, I thought.

Fear is a big source of energy. Seems like it’s a contraction of energy but it also generates energy; fight, flight, or freeze. Fear causes us to collapse away from wide-open aliveness and into ourselves as we prepare for imagined threat. And it’s maybe a way to build connection; we gravitate into tribes for safety according to a shared sense of fear against an imagined assault. Kind of a bummer given the alternative ways available to each of us to feel energy and cultivate connection.

What do I mean when I write about people being starved? Perhaps there’s a vicious cycle, a self-propagating pattern at play. Many folks to me appear to be cut off from their essential source of aliveness,. Time, energy, and attention are directed towards pursuits which attempt to enhance one’s sense of safety, security, comfort, and acceptance. Many of the activities in which we engage are deadening: we work at jobs we don’t love; we stay in relationships beyond their ‘best before’ date; we devote our attention to mind-numbing and energy-sucking time-killers; we inhale mass quantities of substances which are pitiful substitutes for true sustenance (crappy food, crappy entertainment, deficient commercial goods, mind-numbing social media, endless feeds of negative and sensationalized news, drugs and alcohol). Many have come to depend on psychopharmacology simply to cope from one day to the next. In my darker moments, humanity appears zombie-like; the walking dead. Lots of folks are looking for comfort, looking for a jolt of energy, but nothing too strange or unfamiliar – just something to make us feel better, right now.

And that’s where Dunkin’ Donuts reigns supreme. Or maybe Starbucks. I can understand why these consumer options are so popular – they meet so many of our psychological needs in a society that is freaked out, starved for sustenance, and looking for something reliable and soothing. And, the insanity that’s unravelling in the United States around the new president is offering many people a place to come alive, through their fear, in opposition to an apparent “other.” Seems like that was the same mentality that brought Trump to office in the first place.

I can’t help but imagine that if folks stopped looking ‘out there’ for a cause (as well as a saviour) to their discontent and dis-ease and if they began to look more honestly and deliberately at how they feed themselves – physically, relationally, energetically, spiritually, psychologically, intellectually, environmentally as well as creatively – that something wouldn’t begin to shift. Perhaps the ‘out there’ would naturally begin to reflect the individual’s enriched and enlivened inner world.

The process that’s unfolding for me, individually, is to devote more presence to the ways that fear appears in my life. I’m seeing how fear begets a movement of self-preservation, life being protected rather than celebrated. I think the human psyche has become deluded by the notion that life should be shielded and secured rather than unfurled and set free. I think life longs to be liberated. No more need for Dunkin’ Donuts.

Looking back, things are clearer. The angst that was rising, growing. The relief I would feel when clients would cancel. Longing for more time away from therapeutic hours. Looking at my schedule and wondering if there was a way to reconfigure it to better maximize my free time. It wasn’t always this way. For years I was drunk on the study and practice of psychotherapy. And now, here I was beginning to feel resentment towards it and towards life.

Some mornings, many mornings actually, I would open my eyes from sleep in the darkness of my bedroom, feeling around for my identity. And then I would find it and I would hear from inside: “Damn. Here we go again.” Resignedly moving into the kitchen to prepare rich, hot coffee and begin the morning ritual – sometimes 2 hours of meditation, walking the dogs, going for a run or a paddle, eating and bathing – 4 hours to clear the debris of discontent and feel enlivened once more, happy to be alive. After 3 or 4 client-hours, the thick residues of unease would call for a long hike in the woods with my dogs. It might take half an hour or longer in the shining silence of nature for the beauty to break through, for me to shift from heaviness to light. The last hour or two of the counseling day would be buoyed by the promise of an evening lubricated by drink and neutralized by mindless entertainment. And then a return to sleep. And a repeat of the cycle.

“Is this it? Is this as good as it gets?” I would ask myself regularly. Circumstantially, my life was very sweet. I earned a respectable income with freedom and flexibility, working from home with my dogs. I loved the clients with whom I got to share time. I had outdoor passions, rich friendships, amazing health, stable finances, and significant free time to explore other interests. I would frequently admonish myself for being dissatisfied, telling myself that it was me that needed to shift my attitude, be more grateful and wholehearted about my work. I see now that I was afraid to ask myself more difficult questions, questions that would require me to leave my comfort zone even while it had grown less-than-comfortable.

And then life began to speak more loudly. I would get headaches 10 minutes into a session. I was feeling achiness throughout my body. I had nausea. And I was beginning to resist and resent other parts of my life. I was feeling more dependent on my post-work beverage. More cravings for sugar and fats. More mindless eating in general. More Netflix. More longing just to crawl into bed at the end of the day.  I had to motivate myself more to go out on my paddle board. If I didn’t run in the morning, I was damn grumpy by the afternoon. And I noticed that I looked more to stuff, sparkly new stuff in order to get a hit of excitement. Overall, my love for life was going south. I recall texting a friend after a particularly grueling morning of counseling: “Please, I beg you, shoot me, poke my eyes out with a fork, set me on fire – something to put me out of my misery.” How could I ignore the irony and hypocrisy of working in a field geared at helping others to feel more peace, more relief from suffering, and more joy when I was slowly descending into darkness and dissociation?

Life talks to us. Life is talking to us all the time. Life talks through us, through our feelings, through our instincts and intuitions, through our daydreams and our night dreams. When we don’t listen to life, life begins to speak through our bodies. Then, when we still don’t listen, life begins to speak through events and occurrences. I realized that I was afraid to look too deeply at my unhappiness, afraid that I might have to come out of hiding, let go of a sense of stability and security and meaning. But as 2016 turned into 2017, I realized that if I didn’t listen to life, life would speak louder. Life would take the wheel more forcefully. I was more afraid of being forced out of hiding than seeming to make the choice myself.

And so, though I had years invested in being a professional therapist and though I had no idea what else I might do to express my vocational energy and passion, I realized it was time to let go and enter more fully into life, as life. I realized that it was time to let myself be moved.

I attempted to back out of the garage yesterday afternoon with the rear hatch open on my vehicle. I can still feel the sound in my body as metal made contact with metal. The sound of a mistake.

I could offer many words about what might have brought this experience into being. I could give some background on my old self: the character who moved through the world with a great deal of tension and pressure, attempting to ensure that all pieces were in the right place, that nothing was not accounted for, managed, or unanticipated and that no mistakes were made. That conditioned character whom I once considered to be ‘me’ is getting looser. Relaxation and lightness is beginning to take up space where once there was mostly tightness, control, and vigilance. This ride is both awe-inspiring and terrifying.

Letting go of the illusion of control, living beyond my comfort zone, knowingly in the unknown, it’s devastating in so many ways. Where once I told myself I had things under control and managed, now I feel vulnerable. Where once I felt swaddled by a sense of security, now I feel exposed. And where once I felt propped up, costumed, and purposeful in my roles, I now feel naked. I awoke with my 3am demons today, persistent, asking me about what I intended to do about health insurance, how I intended to look after my dogs and their basic needs, where I would end up living if and when I could no longer afford rent, or veterinary bills, or unexpected health issues, or food, or vehicle damage. “You can still change your mind,” the fear-based voices offered, “You can still return to your life, build up more savings, come up with a different professional plan, maybe try this life experiment sometime in the future when you have more ground below you.”

“Forward,” I answered, breathing deeply to ground myself back in the moment, the here and now.

I admit to riding faith right now. If I’m holding onto anything in the unknown, it’s faith. Perhaps faith is the magic carpet ride from one way of being to another. Perhaps faith is all that thinking can find when all the familiar supports are released. I breathe into the quivering vulnerability that is alive in me this morning as I look into the costs of car repairs. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. I’m scared. And I don’t want to reach out to friends and family for emotional support or encouragement. It’s not stubbornness. It’s the desire to meet a new element of aliveness and truth that comes in only when the self isn’t directing itself towards preservation at all costs and insulating itself with illusions of control. An unguarded life. I feel disarmed.

What an adventure. Intentionally, eyes wide open releasing my grasp on familiar and embarking into an untravelled territory.

Inevitably, as I communicate to the people in my life, be they clients, friends, or family, that I am closing my therapy practice, the response is surprise: “Oh!” and then, “What will you do next?”

“I don’t know,” I answer.

I had only a hint, the slightest taste, of how directed my life has been around what I think I know. From childhood, it seemed the main query was what will I do with my life. From there I gathered information in hopes of answering the question most successfully; how to assess my talents, uncover my interests, develop my abilities, and develop a plan and a path forward into the future. The hope: to maximize my enjoyment, security, and sense of self-worth. The same process was engaged in other facets of life: looking for friendships, community, partnership; being a consumer; migrating into the world of home ownership; cultivating a sense of health and wellbeing; developing hobbies and activities – seems it was always a blend of seeing what life was supposed to look like and then adapting those conventions to my ideas of myself.

What I notice now, looking back, is that life as a lived experience was actually shrinking. With the unfolding story of my life, my sense of possibility was disappearing. For my 6-year old self, the world and its potential adventures seemed unlimited. By the time I was 46, not so much. The sense of my self and life which I had cultivated over 4 decades had, in fact, eroded my sense of aliveness. Everything I thought I knew, about me and about life and the world around me, was making life smaller – the more I thought I knew, the more limited life seemed to feel. I was unintentionally killing life.

Willfully entering the unknown, I feel alive, I feel awake. My cells are vibrating. My breathing is more deliberate, fuller. My senses are engaged. The world feels completely different: brighter, fuller, richer, sweeter, more pristine and vital. I can taste the ephemeral truth of existence. I can touch the essential quality of impermanence everywhere in everything. And it’s beautiful.  When I was holding onto my role as a professional, making myself all cozy and comfortable in the known of my life habits, the lens through which I saw the world was coloured by the fiction of constancy and predictability. It often felt dead and lifeless as an experience. Makes sense – without really recognizing it as such, I looked to life to make me feel safe and secure and so it appeared.

Nonetheless, old habits die hard; the desire to know where I’m going and what I will do with my life lives in me and rises up regularly. Fears circulate in my system with regards to finances, home, safety, and comfort. Makes sense but I’m not ready to leave the brilliance of this exploration, not willing to shortchange myself from the riches that await me in this new territory of not-knowing, not planning, and not having answers. In this land of not-knowing, I’m encountering beliefs and fears with regard to limitation, lack, faith, and the truth of existence. I’m also discovering the habits that came into being by virtue of needing to quell the dis-ease of feeling only half-alive: food, busyness, alcohol, entertainment, planning, cleaning, organizing, distracting, acquiring, filling the space within and around me – some of the many ways that I kept my inner angst quiet, the activities I used to hide from myself and life so that I wouldn’t notice my agitation.

It used to be that the way I moved in life depended on the time of day, the day of the week, the season of the year, and the plans I made for me and life. In the unknown, the essential aliveness in my system is speaking to me and I can hear it. I can yield to life flowing through me. Letting go of what I think I know, I come into contact with the presence of something much, much more profound. I am liberated, lightened, awake, and engaged. It feels like I am beginning the return to life following my own near-death experience.

To what do I pray? To what do I devote my heart and my mind? To what do I dedicate my life? This week I’ve asked myself to look honestly at these questions. I, like many others, have made fear my God and from that posture, I have built a life faithful to cultivating security and comfort, committed to self-preservation over aliveness.

Humbling to realize this and see it clearly. To work at a job that doesn’t inspire me. To move in relationships looking to another in order to feel loved and safe. To limit my movements to places and experiences which are familiar. To grip to the known rather than sample life beyond the edges of comfort. And so, running through a frozen landscape one morning this week, having called myself out of hiding, I felt a clear bell ring through my system. From my head, through my heart, and into the fullness of my body, I heard and felt “Done.”

I can’t die having never left on a journey. I can’t come to the end of this human dream having hidden from life. I simply can’t ignore the truth. As a member of the human species, I have fallen prey to the idea that what I essentially am is separate and small and, as such, my existence is predicated on the preservation of life rather than its celebration. While I have been conditioned to see life as something other, something ‘out there’ that must be managed and navigated for the safety and comfort of my existence, I can’t align myself any longer with a paradigm rooted in fear and hiding.

This week, I let go. I saw that my work had become a means to an end rather than a joy in itself. So, I let go. I felt the truth ring through my system – this was never my life to live. And I gave it back. I gave my life back to Life. To the source of every so-called thing, to the All. And I apologized for grabbing hold of something that was never mine in the first place.

I don’t know what happens now other than bringing my work to an end over the next few months. I don’t have any answers. I feel lighter than I’ve ever known and sometimes more crippled by fear and terror than I’ve ever thought possible. I remind myself, I believe in something much more beautiful and brilliant than fear, struggle, and tension. I believe Life is beyond what most people imagine. Gripping life is not living. And so I let go.