Dying to be me.

I attended a funeral a couple of weeks ago.  It was the funeral of a golfing friend I played mixed foursomes with (when you hit alternate shots on the course and the team has to be made up of a man and a woman).  He had Nocturnal Epilepsy where you have fits while you are asleep.  He died suddenly on 29th December 2012 at the vibrant age of 29.

On my way to the funeral (it was in Plymouth so I had to drive for 4 hours there, 4 hours back) I listened to an entire audio book called 'Dying to be Me by Anita Moorjani'. In her book she writes of a near death experience she had in 2006 when she had advanced lymphoma (cancer of the lymphatic system) to the point where she was in a coma and fully expected by the medical profession to die when she was admitted to hospital on that day.  She had the experience of leaving her body and returning to it and she eloquently describes what it was like to be free of her cancer ridden body for the time she left it.  Her description felt familiar to me - it was one of unconditional love, clarity, understanding, compassion, peace, joy and jubilation.  I say it felt familiar because I have heard so many people say the same thing about the true nature of reality, and now there is another one of us reporting that our true nature is far more than we take ourselves to be on in our daily lives.  

I drove to the funeral taking all this in and by the time I arrived, I didn't feel sad for my friend, I felt I was in a place to appreciate his essence and feel into his presence that is not determined by whether he has a body or not.  What had me feel such huge sadness was seeing his family in all their grief and despair at losing their delightful, talented, funny and young son and brother.  And all his friends were there too - he was so loved and the service was light hearted, appreciative and very real.  I realised that grief is actually love.  Grief only happens when we love, it's a product of love.

On my way home, brought back to my humanity with a jolt, I vowed to say 'f**k it' to anything that doesn't make my heart feel bigger. I vowed to myself that this precious life is to be respected and lived in a way that has me play the bigger game - of bringing myself fully to this exquisite life. 

We could all be gone tomorrow.  Death comes to us all at some point.  It's the only thing that we can be 100% sure of about our futures.  Here's to life and us being here in this human experience in all it's glory. 

What does it really take to change ?

Recently I have been asking myself big questions about how to be the kind of person that has people in my life feel seen, heard, supported and loved.  Often I am in the company of people who are suffering, or want things in their life to be different for whatever reason, and somehow I find myself in the role of supporting them in making changes that would have them feel more aligned with happiness and purpose.

What are the qualities I need to embody in order for this to happen? How do I need to be within myself for this to be a possibility?

In sitting with this question, a story came up in a conference call I was on the other night, about Jessica Ennis, the 2012 Olympics Team GB Gold Medal Winner of the Heptathlon event.  A lady was telling us the story of an interview that was broadcast on the BBC about the Javelin throwing and the work her coach had to do with her to improve her score in this event – which would enable her to compete for the medals they both so wanted to win at the 2012 Olympics.

Jess and her coach knew that they had to adjust the angle of her Javelin throw by four degrees in order for her score to be good enough in this part of the Heptathlon event.  Her coach was saying in this interview that with five days per week of Javelin practise leading up to the 2012 Olympics, he planned to change her throw by approximately 1 degree each year.  And they needed the change to be by four degrees in total. When the interviewer asked him what his role was in this process, he spoke of his ‘real work’ being compassion, empathy and understanding. Jess had to go through the slow change that would take her to where she wanted to get to, and what she needed from her coach was him keeping her to the promise they had made, and to be with her in a way that had her feel compassionately supported and deeply ‘seen’ through all the ups and downs that were to come with this change.

This story resonated with me – I sometimes feel I am here to help, or to assist in having people be happier.  I feel attached to the world being a happier place, and if I see myself failing to do this in any way, I give myself a really hard time.  Hearing this story hit me somewhere inside, showing me my ‘real’ work: that it’s not the short term, immediate outcome (being happier) that is the most important thing, but being the kind of person that can be with the process that people are all going through in their lives – with compassion, empathy and understanding.  That I would be the kind of person who can be present to discomfort, anxiety and all that comes with being human and be able to meet it all with respect and kindness, would mean I am being the kind of person I want to be.

No one showed me the map!

No one showed me the map – what to expect when we step on to our spiritual path. 

Sometimes we’d rather be asleep again – sometimes we’d rather not think so much about things, feel so deeply or be so sensitive to life.  At times, we wish we could turn back the clock and avoid what we now see and experience.  When we encounter others who are leading seemingly ‘simple’ lives which don’t seem to feature the depth of understanding and the ups and downs that come with being on a spiritual path, we have the thought that maybe it would be nice to go back, to live our long gone oblivious lives.

I want to be able to inform myself and my clients of what development takes, what it looks like and what we can expect.  I want to be able to use this is a comfort, a map, a reassuring guide to when things feel difficult – one of my teachers once said that if we don’t address this topic, that it’s like taking people through the Himalayas on a life long trek but not showing them the map before they set off.

I am going to write about my understanding of ‘The Stages of the Work’ with the purpose of delving more deeply into how we unfold in our learning and growth as human beings - with the hope that this will also serve as a useful map for anyone who is growing or developing and is interested to see what this natural process can look like.   I am using the inspiration of three sources to write this – one comes from Russ Hudson and Don Riso’s ‘Strata’ model from their book The Widsom of The Enneagram, and the other comes from James Flaherty’s Ten Ways model of Development, and the other is my own experience of myself and my journey. 

The Stages of the Work:

We are Asleep.

  

A: Our Habitual Image of Ourselves.  This is the stage I have spoken of above – the stage we sometimes feel envious of – it’s when we are wondering around without an awareness of the effect we have – we have no idea what impact our beliefs and thoughts have on us or anyone around us.  We take most things for granted and we feel as if the world is being ‘done’ to us.  We feel like victims of this world and we are not questioning anything about our experience.

We are Questioning.

B: What We Are Really Like.  At this stage, when we embark on learning something about what made us the way we are today, we begin to experience what we are REALLY like – not what we imagine ourselves to be like.  Until now our awareness is too dispersed to see clearly what we are really up to – what part we play in creating our lives.  This is where our assumptions about who we are and what we are come into question, and we see for instance, that we are not relaxed at all, that our bodies are tense and our shoulders are tight.  We start to notice for example, that we have an underlying mood where we expect things to go wrong, and we just thought we were being ‘sensible’.  We see, eventually, that we are actually late for events all the time, when we thought we weren’t a ‘late person’.  The list will go on and on for all of us.

We are Learning.

C: Why we act how we act, what our attitudes are really.  At this stage, it becomes clear what drives us to act, what underlies how we deal with the challenges of our life.  Good therapy has us uncover this level of learning that brings clarity as to how come our lives have turned out this way up to now.  We shift away from blaming others and we realise our part in the patterns that are shaped in our lives.  We start to see the underlying motivations that drive the patterns in our lives.  For example, my underlying motivation for doing all that I do in the world could be to be liked, to avoid confrontation, to be different, to be accepted, to be successful, to be superior, to be safe, to remain happy, to be strong – and the list goes on.  Once we become clear on the underlying issues that have us think, act and feel the ways we do, the lights get switched on to our underlying issues and how they drive everything about our lives.

We are Diving Deep.

D: What we find underneath our formed patterns.  As we enter this stage, when we have embarked upon studying in detail how we are and what makes who we are, we experience ourselves as being ‘caught in the act’.  We can see ourselves acting out our habitual patterns – until this point, we have only remembered what we did in past situations – now we are seeing ourselves clearly and experience how we are perpetuating our patterns even further.  As we are present, a small opening appears that gives us another option to the engrained habitual behaviour we are so familiar with – it’s a small opening of choice, and one which we normally don’t take.  At this stage, we can experiment with doing something that we don’t normally do, and seeing how it feels, what we think and what happens in our bodies.  For example, a song that we’d normally switch the radio off for – can we listen and be present to it rather than doing what we’d normally do and watch what our experience is ?  It’s starting to become clear here that our personality or ego is a set of defences that keep us exactly the way we are – it’s a coping strategy that has kept us alive for our lifetimes and it’s defending any new experience from truly being lived.  The graceful quality of this stage, is that we are able to notice that there is something else happening other than what we are immersed in during any moment – there may be an argument happening but my awareness is wide enough that I know there is something other than this – that this is not everything.  I may feel small and contracted, frustrated or sad, but I am held in something other than my immediate experience – I am within a presence that is what it is regardless of what seems to be happening in my body, my mind, my surroundings and my emotions.  I am able to see more clearly all the defences I employ and when I don’t buy into them as wholly as before, I experience an unknown – an experience of being something other than my habitual self.  We have to be aware at this stage that the personality or ego will be trying to keep us small in an even more exaggerated way – so kindness and acceptance of our patterns is essential.

We are Opening.

E: The parts of our humanity we are most scared of and have most judgements on.  As we develop further, and we start to let go of all the ways we have defended ourselves or kept ourselves small, we begin to experience shame, rage, anger, fear and all of the raw energies we have access to as human beings.  We see all the ways we have covered up these energies and we let them go to reveal that we are rageful, we are terrified, we are angry, hurt or deficient.  As we continue to be present and to live in our awareness, we become aware of all that is being held down by defences, we become aware that there are blockages and the more present we become, the more we feel is being blocked – and we experience this being released.  These experiences are physical and emotional – they are not cognitive – you can’t think your way out of these energies.  All that we can bring to these energies is breathing, presence and awareness.  We know at this stage that it doesn’t help to act out the energies we are experiencing – it doesn’t serve us to impact others with these experiences and we are able to be with the rawness which is then beautifully part of life – it becomes an aliveness that is filled with energy and vibrancy.  At this stage we realise that what we don’t deal with and become present to will be passed on to those who we love – it’s an act of love to be with these energies and to learn not to act out on them.  With presence, love and awareness, they can be transformed and contribute to our aliveness and life force.

We are in the Aftermath.

F: Nowhere to stand.  At this stage, we have dropped our habitual behaviour to the extent that we have an experience of not knowing how to be, where to stand, how to interact, who we are, what we are here for.  It’s like all our tools have been taken away from us and we are simply a piece of life pulsating in a body.  We feel empty, hollow, fraudulent as if our usual strategies are deficient and do not get us what we want – ironically they keep us away from it.   At this stage, we learn to relax, to truly relax into being and to let it all go – to let go of all the ways we have learned to be in the world, to make way for another kind of life experience in the moment, an exquisite presence that is immediate, gentle, surrendered and accepting.  At this point, we surrender in the experience that we don’t have the answers, we let go of all we have held on to and we breathe.   From here on, everything is creation from a platform of nothingness, everything is new and seen with new eyes.

The stages beyond this are beyond my development and have been described as things such as The Void, Universal Being Itself, The Death of the Ego -  which I cannot write about at this stage of my growth.

I hope this has given us some kind of guide as to the territory we get into when we begin and continue to follow our journeys.  Let us welcome the challenges that encourage us on the path and let us embrace the grace that is always landing in our hearts in each moment to hold us through it all.