The 99th Monkey

Mom Flies Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Eliezer Sobel — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:33:58 +0000

Several weeks ago my mother, in her eighth or ninth year of Alzheimer’s Disease, and 63^rd year of marriage, began wielding knives and trying to stab people, verbally threatening to kill my father, throwing dangerous glass objects and screaming bloody murder at her own image in the mirror—“I DON’T WANT YOU HERE, GET OUT!!!” My brother and I finally intervened and had her temporarily hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, hoping we could buy more time for her at home through stabilizing her on the right meds, and getting Dad more help. We chose a modern, upscale hospital in a New Jersey suburb that came highly recommended, and where we had a personal connection with the presiding geriatric psychiatrist on the unit. My parents are fairly well off and have excellent insurance. By all measures, this should have been among the best our health care system has to offer, or certainly several notches above The New York State Asylum for Idiots (referring, I believe, to the staff, not the patients.)

My father and brother brought Mom to the ER, as planned, to get a few simple medical tests out of the way as part of the Admittance procedure. Seven hours later, my dear, traumatized, 85-year-old toddler-mother was covered in bruises and black and blue marks; they had knocked her out on Ativan to make her easier to work with, then waited until she was awake to have five people hold her down while they shoved a catheter up her; presumably, a urine sample was vitally crucial at that moment for an extremely agitated and frightened, sobbing and screaming Alzheimer’s patient.

It was not an auspicious beginning, and right away Dad began declaring this to be “the worst mistake I’ve ever made,” conveniently forgetting that the home scene had begun to resemble a bad Hitchcock film and my brother and I were fielding up to 10 calls a day from him in the heat of battle. The ER torture chamber was only the beginning of surviving two weeks of madness, on all sides. On Day Two, the geriatric physician ordered an x-ray and CAT Scan of Mom’s G-I tract, based on the inaccurate report that she had been vomiting repeatedly for several days. She had thrown up once in the ER, but not since. My brother almost threw up in the ER just watching her ordeal. The x-ray was normal.

I arrived on the scene a few days later and met with her psychiatrist, who told us the precise dosage of Seroquel he was prescribing. I was naturally concerned when the nurses delivered something different and showed us their written orders; we didn’t know if the doctor had neglected to update them or had changed his mind about the dose and neglected to update us. It was even more disturbing when we called him to clarify and heard, “This mailbox is full,” and couldn't even leave a message. Eventually I figured out that most of the other patients there were alone much of the time, and he probably wasn’t used to dealing with families that actually pay attention to little details like when and how much powerful anti-psychotic medication our loved one is receiving which Dad will be responsible for administering once she gets out.

It dawned on us early on that we were in charge of Mom’s basic needs and care, alerting the nurses when she needed to use the bathroom or be changed, monitoring her meds, and providing her three meals a day from the outside, because she eats very few things anymore, only specific items that the hospital couldn’t provide: matzo-ball soup and corned beef from The Kosher Nosh.

Dad had to persuade the nurses to allow him to administer the medications using his own, special method: a base of vanilla ice-cream topped with a layer of whipped cream, then the crushed pills, followed by another layer of whipped cream and topped off with chocolate syrup. Some of the nurses let him do this and it was easy, and my mother ate it in five minutes. The mean Nurse Ratchet, however, insisted on doing it her way, which was to attempt to force a single spoonful of whipped cream into my Mom’s mouth against her will, escalating her agitation and resistance, and requiring about a half hour of struggle, frustration and anger.

My brother, a psychologist, observed with bewilderment as various social workers and psychiatrists did “intake interviews”; my mother hasn’t uttered a logical sentence in several years, except by accident, like the other day when out of the blue she looked up at Dad and said, “Your nose is worse than mine,” and the day before it was, “Your face is Christian.” My brother kept waiting for either Rod Serling or Allen Funt to step forward as he listened to these professional conversations:

“How are you feeling today Mrs. Sobel?”

“I have no fish.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“You can have the fleigels, and if you need more tomorrow, somebody can help you plisselage.”

Every morning the names of all the patients were listed on a chalkboard along with the name of their nurse for that shift. I was very pleased to see, when I first got there, that Mom’s nurse had only been assigned one geriatric patient that day; one-on-one care, I thought, that’s pretty impressive. The only glitch was that I stayed with Mom for the entire day and didn’t run into this particular nurse even once. But at least she was listed on the board, and that counts for something.

Like many Alzheimer’s patients, Mom has an aversion to and fear of water and so has not had a bath or shower in over three years, and instead we have had an aide gently sponge-bathe her. The hospital’s compassionate idea was to force her into a shower immediately upon arising, regardless of her morning mood which is often not her friendliest time; not surprisingly, it required three psych nurses to restrain her, as we stood outside listening to her heart-wrenching, blood-curdling screams, kicking and spitting, emerging 20 minutes later covered in fresh bruises up and down her legs, and collapsing in my father’s or my arms with deep sobbing and tears. This would be a scene we would have to endure often, matched only by the diaper-changes, which she was also not overly fond of, to say the least, and had mastered the art of clenching her buttocks to avoid being cleaned up.

The good news about Alzheimer’s, of course, is that within a fairly short time, these daily incidents would be quickly forgotten and, as the new meds regime started kicking in, within a few days Mom was mostly back to her smiling, sunny self, initiating wonderfully inane conversations with everyone she passed in the hallway and playing duets with me in the piano room. She would play single notes in perfect 4/4 time as I improvised, and we sang Tumbalalaika and Rock of Ages together. She and my father danced as I played the Anniversary Waltz.

However, after two weeks of this routine, my Dad was completely battered and worn down from all the stress and anxiety, and had contracted bronchitis. Mom was sleeping through the night and mostly calm during the day, apart from the horrible hygiene events, and the psychiatrist let us know that there was not likely to be a pill to cure that. So my Dad decided it was time to take her home, and we had the official discharge meeting with the staff; they all gave the go-ahead, providing the M.D. checked her out, because Mom had been coughing and complaining of a sore throat. But with everything seemingly in place for a discharge the next day, I headed back to my home in Virginia.

Two hours later, I received an alarming call from my bewildered Dad: the hospital had called him, said that Mom had fever, and a chest x-ray had revealed a bit of fluid on her lungs, which could be pneumonia. Since they had been unable to give her the required antibiotic, the doctor had ordered her moved to a medical unit to be restrained and put on an I-V drip for ten days. Dad was beside himself, and pleaded with the nurse who called him to wait until he got there so he could try to give her the medication himself. Her response was, “We have to follow the doctor’s orders, and they might come for her before you get here.”

Two things were crystal clear to me: another ten days of traveling back and forth to the hospital, and buying and preparing all of Mom’s meals, would kill my father, who already sounded awful and looked like death warmed over; secondly, I didn’t want my mother restrained under any circumstances. I called the nurse, the social worker, and the physician, and was a bit louder and more forceful than is my usual manner, threatening to remove Mom AMA—Against Medical Advice—and asserting our rights in the matter. The nurse merely repeated that it was the doctor’s orders; the doctor, when I reached her, assured me that in fact, her orders had been to move Mom ONLY if my father agreed, and that she had said nothing about the duration of the move, nothing about staying there for ten days. Obviously their team has communication issues.

Meanwhile, my Dad got there on time, successfully administered the antibiotic sundae, the crisis was averted and the discharge plan was back in place for the following day. The importance of continuing the antibiotic was emphasized to Dad, and if he was unable to get Mom to take it at home, a visiting nurse would have to come daily and give her an injection. When I got home I spoke to the hospital’s Home Health Department which deploys the visiting nurse, and was told that they would actually NOT be able to come every day, that their job was to teach the caregiver how to deliver the injection, and “oh, by the way, it’s not a simple subcutaneous shot, but a long, intra-muscular needle.” Yeah, that’ll work, no problem. Dad, in the meantime, had conferred with his pharmacist and learned that the antibiotic was available in liquid form, a little piece of information nobody had mentioned at the hospital.

Finally, on the day of The Great Escape, rather than risk any further setbacks, we had gotten hold of an architectural blueprint of the hospital’s infrastructure, located the ventilator system, and Dad was able to put Mom in a wheel chair and roll her down a metal heating chute, landing her in a dumpster outside the building that was thankfully filled with discarded mattresses. He was disguised as a visiting physician in a white coat and fake mustache, with a thick German accent.

He got Mom home and took her the next day to see her local physician. They took a new x-ray; her lungs and chest were clear and normal. They took blood; her white count was normal.They took her vitals, listened to her chest and looked at her throat; everything normal. No need for the pill, the liquid, the injection or the I-V drip.

It would be unfair if I didn’t mention that the staff on the psych ward included many—or even mostly—wonderful, loving and caring people, along with several absolute Angels of Mercy who were miraculously able to change and clean Mom without so much as a whimper of protest, and even got her laughing in the process, saying “Thank you” and coming out happy. But I still felt like I was in a Kafka novel most of the time.

The most useful information that came of the experience is that my Dad finally recognizes that Mom is completely oblivious to her surroundings; and so, contrary to his long-held fear, she will not hate him or feel utterly betrayed if and when he needs to place her in an Alzheimer’s facility, for in two weeks at the hospital she never once wondered where she was or why, and never asked to go home. Of course when she is home, she asks to go home all the time.

May the fragins of her schusseldorf be peaceful and Dad’s seaweed horkable, Amen.

Relaxing With God

Eliezer Sobel — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:26:42 +0000

When Thoreau was on his deathbed, his aunt asked him if he had made his peace with God, and he responded, "I was not aware that we had quarreled." Someone else once said—I don't recall the source—that "The most salient characteristic of an enlightened being is not what one might think—having great wisdom, emanating love, and so forth—but rather, that they are completely relaxed."

I have certainly had my share of restful times in hot tubs over the years, and have received countless wonderful and deeply soothing massages, but truthfully, I don't think I have been completely relaxed since I was, oh, say, two hours old.

Actually, come to think of it, those first two hours weren't so great either. On the contrary, I was the youngest person ever to suffer from Post-Traumatic-Stress-Syndrome; it came over me just moments after a rather terrifying and sudden expulsion from the safety and comfort of my cozy room, the only home I'd ever known, to be sent God-knows-where. Talk about a rude awakening. And now that I'm older and finally beginning to grasp where in fact I was sent, I believe that my response to being born was quite appropriate to the situation. Apart from the trauma of getting evicted, given the nature of what goes on here on this planet, birth is a bitch.

That's why, back in the New Age days of yore, Leonard Orr created "Rebirthing," a technique that uses deep and continuous breathing in order to regress and relive one's birth trauma and heal that primal wound, that original separation from what we knew to be the very source and home of our Being before we were summarily dumped off in a completely bizarre situation. As another figure from that era, Stewart Emery, once said, "Nobody told us when we were born that we were coming to the lunatic asylum of the galaxy."

Many spiritual systems would assert, however, that the actual birth process is only a physical mirror of a more primordial sense of separation that lives in our consciousness itself, a misperception of an illusory ego believing itself to stand alone and apart from the "All and the Everything," the "Unified Cosmic Field" that underlies and is the very stuff and substance of Being and existence. The birth process just makes the situation worse, because we retain a cellular memory of that original state we knew in the womb of absolute safety, the bliss of unity, and complete relaxation (barring cruel and unusual neonatal incidents); from that moment on, anything short of those feelings is never quite enough, and a perpetual sense of suffering and dissatisfaction—subtle or not-so-subtle—fuels the forward motion of our lives.

Those of us traveling a spiritual path have become more consciously aware of this basic, fundamental disturbance in our core, goading us onward toward an elusive goal that seems forever out of reach. And since the womb is obviously no longer available, we've spiritually upgraded the object of our yearning to God or Awakening, striving for union with the Divine, dissolving into the Light, merging with the Beloved, to open our hearts, get enlightened, or one of a myriad variations along those lines. A traditional description of this journey compares it to a fish in search of water; if the fish would just stop swimming around for a second and completely relax and be still, it might have a better chance of recognizing that it is always-already residing in the very place for which it is relentlessly searching. Every step towards the goal is actually a step away from it. Perhaps that explains those annoying Zen masters who are always saying, "There is nowhere to go and nothing to do." (Meanwhile, they sit on cushions staring at the wall for 40 years to prove the point!)

But actually, Zen, as well as many other spiritual paths, advise us to meditate, not to get anywhere, but to "be still and know," to re-cognize that our essential nature is already present and exists prior to our egoic identity and the concomitant underlying intimation that something's not quite right, that we're not quite okay, and that we need to do something to remedy the situation, ASAP. Again and again we are told by those in the enlightenment business that we need only "Rest in the Present Wholeness of your True Nature," that which lives outside of time and precedes even the womb; for who we really are, we are advised, is completely independent of this merely temporal residence in a body/mind.

And if being Eternal and not constrained by a body/mind isn't relaxing, I don't know what is! But what would being "completely relaxed" actually feel like, while we are here? This is how I imagine it:

1) Someone who is completely relaxed would probably never need Valium to take the edge off. The edge is off. (I refilled my RX today.)

2) There would either be a complete absence of fear and worry, particularly the fear of death, or, when fear or worry did arise, one's Relaxed Self would somehow remain unruffled, not worried about being worried, not fully identified as the one who is scared. And to take it one step further, even if this person did identify as the fearful one, and did get ruffled, he or she would be relaxed about that state of affairs as well. In other words, this dude is really mellow about "what is," no matter what's going on, inside or out.

3) The Completely Relaxed Ones would be free of the core, egoic disturbance of imagined separation from Source, and so would be likewise released from the driving force to "become"—anything—so there would be no anxiety-stricken movement toward a future that held out any promise for some anticipated state or situation that might arrive "someday" and improve the quality of their lives in any way. As Werner Erhard once bluntly put it to me, staring right into my eyes, "There isn't ANYTHING that is EVER going to come along that is going to make you happy. NOTHING. Getting that is the entrée into the system in which the truth lies, for the truth is always and only found now, in the circumstances you've got." That was quite sobering news for a truth-seeker.

It is also why "now" has become so popular; just "this," whatever is present right now, is considered to be the opportune moment—indeed, the only moment—and when we completely relax into that understanding, we will experience the present as sufficient, complete and satisfying. Or beyond merely "sufficient," the present moment, were we to gaze upon it with eyes "unclouded by longing," would be seen to be permeated by unfathomable mystery and unspeakable beauty. We are tripping over God with every step we take.

4) This possible human I'm constructing would have a deep and innate trust in the unfolding process of life, filled with a seemingly naïve and childlike certainty that we live in a benevolent universe and therefore, as Julian of Norwich asserted,

All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

If we experienced that to be an absolutely true statement, we'd be a lot more laid-back about all the evidence that appears daily to dispute that claim. We'd be relaxed and fundamentally okay with the moment-by-moment, unfolding life stories of everyone everywhere, both the good and the horrible, including those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune aimed directly at us. Recognizing the providential perfection of the moment, however, does not at all preclude experiencing a natural, effortless compassion for those in pain and suffering, as well as a deep desire to help. Or at the very least, we'd be committed to not making things worse for anyone while we're here. That seems like a reasonable goal for the likes of most of us.

But who among us will ever fulfill all these criteria? After 57 years of being more or less a nervous wreck about this whole living thing, it would be somewhat of a shock and a gift of Grace if I was suddenly free of fear and the race against time to "become" something or somebody, and just completely relaxed into a felt sense of satisfaction and joy with things "just how they are," in harmony with the "Way of Things," as Taoism describes it. I don't think I would recognize myself. Or perhaps that way of being would be more familiar to me than my own face.

I have learned this much: the meaning of the word "practice" in the phrase "spiritual practice" is exactly that: it's not something we do to get somewhere, change ourselves or become anything. It's to practice just being here, however things are. When we meditate, we're not trying to attain a better state of mind, although that is obviously pleasant and welcome when it happens. Rather, we are practicing the act of simply sitting and being relaxed with any and all mind states or life situations, all of which are forever changing and temporary, coming and going, including our bodies. As Dharma teacher Christopher Titmuss put it, "We are looking for that in us which does not arise or pass away." We sit inside a boundless, impartial, endlessly empty container—we are a Vast Viewing Station—inside of which all of life continues to strut about with great fanfare and drama...signifying nothing.

It just might be that the ultimate spiritual teaching, were we one day to come face to face with a Great Awakened One, would simply be, "Hey, take it easy. Chill."

And on the seventh day, God said, "Relax."

I Won't Grow Up

Eliezer Sobel — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:19:16 +0000

Somewhat miraculously, I have managed to reach the age of 57 without experiencing the grief and loss over the death of any immediate family members. My parents—married nearly 63 years—along with my 60-year-old brother and I, recently sat around the family dinner table in the house I grew up in; I have only known life that includes that primordial home and all of the people in it. As a result, I felt like a child a lot longer than most people, and continue to feel a lot younger than some Assisted Living facilities seem to think I am; apparently most of them will take anyone over 55!

On the other hand, it is definitely true that I could actually use a bit of assistance in living; someone to track my Frequent Flyer miles, for starters. (Somehow I have flown all over the world more than just about everyone I know, and yet I have only managed to get one free flight my entire life!) But when exactly did my youth skip right through middle age into the domain of senior citizen? How is that possible? I still have part of my Matchbox miniature car collection displayed proudly on a shelf, along with my full stack of Hardy Boys books. I still play the electric guitar I got in 8th grade, and the piano my parents bought when I was five, using the reparations money my mother was awarded by Germany as a consolation prize for having survived the Holocaust.

Someone once suggested that I was a clear example of the "Eternal Puer" syndrome: "Puer Aeternus," Wikipedia tells us, "is Latin for eternal child, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young..." (So far, so good.) "Psychologically it refers to an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level." (Bummer. But I actually don't think I've advanced as far as adolescence yet, so maybe that's better?) "He chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable." (True, unless it's at the hands of Mistress Alexandra in the The Dungeon.) "The ‘positive' side of the puer appears as the Divine Child who symbolizes newness, potential for growth, hope for the future..." (I'm up for the newness and growth, but the Zen people warn that "hope for the future" is a prescription for despair in the present.) "The ‘negative' side is the child-man who refuses to grow up and meet the challenges of life face on, waiting instead for his ship to come in and solve all his problems." (I do face some of the challenges of life. Just last week I put together and successfully hung a two-tiered bathroom shelf unit for my Dad, and it involved using those little plastic anchor thingies. As for waiting for my ship to solve all my problems, I'm not that naïve. I only think it would solve some of my problems, primarily the one about waiting for the ship.) And finally, "There is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about."

In many spiritual circles, it is suggested that a lot of us suffer from this last one, the vague notion that our "real" life hasn't quite kicked in yet and remains forever just out of reach, around the next corner, waiting for us to accomplish this or that, move here or there, meet him or her, earn a certain amount, achieve a particular position. The obvious problem with this is that around the next corner is always another corner, and we never get there. In fact, we can't get there from here, and according to everyone-who-is-anyone in the God business, here is where the action is. Real life is already in progress, and those of us who are always looking to the future are in the meantime missing the only show in town. The usual metaphor used is sleep vs. wakefulness. When asked who he was, and whether he was enlightened, Buddha is said to have simply replied, "I am awake."

As a newborn child/Prince, it was prophesied to the Buddha's father, the King, that his son would grow up to either be a great king or a great holy man. Preferring the former, the King attempted to prevent his son (Siddhartha Gautama) from seeing the realities of life by restricting him to the plush interior of the palace grounds. But eventually Siddhartha slipped through the gate and came face to face with aging, disease and death, causing him to relinquish his life of royalty, his wife and child, and begin his quest for truth, awakening and Buddhahood. I, too, slipped through the gates of our family palace a long time ago. We all have. There is no scarcity of aging, disease and death surrounding all of us, all of the time. It's a worldwide epidemic. I may still think I'm a kid, but somehow all my friends seem to be aging, some have died, some relatives are seriously ill and many have already passed on. None of us thinks it will happen to us, despite the Tibetan yogi Milarepa's admonition:

"You people sitting here think that death will come sauntering over to you. NO! Whenever death comes, it strikes like lightning!"

I just hope my ship comes in before the lightning strikes, which would wreck everything.

"Peter Pan Syndrome" is the pop-psychology version of the Eternal Puer, (a Jungian notion) but it was with great relief that I learned from Wikipedia that "Peter Pan Syndrome is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and is not yet recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder." Whew. Close call. One can't help but wonder, though, given the propensity for new diagnostic labels to magically elicit new and expensive pharmaceutical cures, what drug would have emerged to deal with Peter Pan Syndrome? An "Emotional Aging" substance? It causes the user to develop a sudden urge to get a prostate exam, watch The Charlie Rose Show, and sit on park benches feeding pigeons. "Side effects include constipation, resignation and user may cease to enjoy previous activities."

In defense of Peter's signature I-won't-grow-up position, an argument could be made that the freshness of vision that is natural to a child is not wholly unrelated to the wakefulness of a Buddha. The child sees life with an immediacy of presence and direct experience, from a place of native innocence; the Buddha from hard-earned wisdom. The difficulty arises in that long, tedious period between childhood and Buddhahood—our lives—during which time we suffer the burden of becoming the dreaded "grown-up," which, from a kid's perspective, always seemed to mean, "No more fun." It's no surprise, then, that the grown-ups who are living their lives fully and enjoying it to the hilt, are those who managed to retain or recover their original ability as kids to embrace and love life authentically, without pretense and whole-heartedly. (Are there really any grown-ups out there who truly love life? What am I missing? What about the whole aging, disease and death part? As Woody Allen said, "If one person is starving anywhere, it wrecks my whole day." Word on the spiritual street is, achieving Buddhahood, i.e. "waking up," brings us to a direct realization that everyone's True Nature is not the one that dies, or was ever born, that we all exist outside of time and body as pure Awareness and empty Consciousness, which gives us a bit of a handle on the tragicomedy of our situation. So there is a happy ending, but the paradox those enlightenment guys kill you with, is that they also insist that the happy ending is not up ahead of us in the future, but is already present, were we only awake to it. They're messing with our heads.)

May we all awaken, remain young-at-heart, grow up and not just face life but dance with it, get old gracefully, and die peacefully. In the meantime, I have to start getting my Halloween outfit together. This year I'm wearing a three-piece suit, carrying an attaché case and going as a Management Consultant.

The Tribal Embrace

Eliezer Sobel — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:47:31 +0000

I spent last weekend in a very deep workshop that provoked a lot of tears and feelings, both of which are often in short supply for me. It was a "5-Rhythms^TM"-based group, the healing-through-movement practice developed by Gabrielle Roth, a work that I have been engaged with, on and off, for 30 years, (and lately, I also teach it.) Gabrielle is currently dealing with a serious health issue, so I send her prayers of healing and love and offer this missive as a testimony to what she has given the world.

In Gabrielle's work, the dance floor is a metaphor for our lives, and thus what goes on there can be as complex, messy and exhilarating as the rest of life. While on the surface, the 5 Rhythms may seem to be about dance, movement is merely the vehicle for a powerful, healing process of meditation-in-motion, aimed at unifying the body, heart, mind, soul and spirit into our original wholeness, and addressing our collective cultural disease of fragmentation, or what Gabrielle has called "trizo-phrenia": thinking one thing, feeling another, and doing a third. In this particular weekend, I experienced and expressed a deep well of grief throughout the four days—primarily around the inevitable loss of my parents and everyone else I love, the unthinkable sufferings of the world at large, and my personal and private litany of unfulfilled dreams and dashed expectations I had for myself as a young man.

But I quickly recognized and remembered that I am not a special case; there were as many wounded hearts in the room as there were people, and our leader—the wondrously talented Andrea Juhan—

kept reminding us that although we each have our personal and unique histories, we also share a greater field of unified awareness, one that includes all of our individual hurts, all of our betrayed, crushed or terrified hearts, all of our disappointments, loss, rage and grief. (Sound like a fun workshop so far? Fear not: underneath and alongside the pain we also collectively entered an exquisite field of profound beauty, the deep joy of loving connection, our bodies and hearts dancing wild and free.)

Then, with only a few hours to go in our time together, a young man in the group suddenly received word that his father had just died.

His first overwhelming impulse was to leave the group immediately and grieve alone. But a gentle coaxing from several of the participants and staff brought him back into the room and onto the dance floor, completely shattered, and completely supported. Never in my 30+ years of being both a workshop attendee and leader have I experienced a group so instantly and dramatically let go of their own self-preoccupations and drop down seven layers into a tangible and collective well of grief and love, surrounding and bearing witness for our fellow participant.

When I worked as a lay hospital chaplain, I learned that it is a holy and sacred occasion to sit with someone at the time of their passing; on this occasion, we learned as a group that it is equally profound to be with someone experiencing their first wave of utter loss, shock and sorrow at hearing the news of a beloved's death. The man e-mailed our group several days later, saying "I almost walked away and isolated myself from the greatest gift I have ever received."

How often in our time of greatest need do we choose to completely withdraw, and attempt to deal with our inner turmoil privately, waiting until we have put our messy insides together sufficiently to be "presentable" enough to gingerly make social contact again? We each received a profound lesson from this man, about responding to deep pain and vulnerability another way, a way of remaining present to unbearable suffering, while allowing that raw, naked place within to be seen and tenderly held by others.

Earlier in the weekend, Andrea had asked us to "Enter the space within you that loves to dance," and I heard myself thinking, "I don't love to dance. I do it because I think it is good for me, kind of like going to the gym. But love it? My hip is killing me, my arthritic toes hurt, I can't keep up with the 20-year olds—who loves that?" As our shells cracked, however, and all of us walking-wounded began peeking out of our inner, private worlds of separation and pain, I began to remember what I DO love about the dance: connection. The magic on the dance floor (remember, dance floor=life) primarily occurs for me when I drop into my essential Self and deeply connect with others, in this case through a non-verbal, moving exchange of essence and energy. That's where the love is.

And that's also where the hurt can be, so we all tend to proceed with great caution when approaching another's world. Dare we toss caution to the winds and risk being seen? If we drop our masks and stand naked and emotionally vulnerable before another, will we still be loved and accepted? Can we release the habitual presentation of our social personas and stand inside our authenticity and connect from there?

When we are able to do these things, something magical happens; the world shifts, and becomes a much friendlier place, one that can welcome and hold whoever we happen to be, without our habitual and often unconscious obsession with trying to change or fix who we are in the hopes of pleasing some imaginary jury and gaining their love, acceptance and approval.

What if all of who we are, just as we are, was not only sufficient, but loveable, mysterious and ultimately an empty, clear vessel of Divine transmission-in-action? That recognition, when embraced, instantly transforms us from someone who is constantly looking for love (in all the wrong places), into a beacon of light, someone able to freely dole the love out. As Gabrielle used to intone in the early days, "You have to give to live." The spiritual path is never about getting something, despite all of our efforts to do so. St. Francis made it very simple: "Let me not so much seek to be loved, (and understood) as to love, (and understand)."

I remember a poignant and profound moment with Ram Dass, several years after a stroke had temporarily robbed him of his former verbal lucidity, and it was almost as if he had been forced to become a poet, to express himself in only a few words instead of the two-hour entertaining lectures for which he had always been famous. We happened to find ourselves together in a tiny meditation room at the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram in Taos, he in his wheelchair, me on the floor, and we shared a moment of silently gazing into one another's eyes. Then, as his attendant began to wheel him out of the room, he simply commented, "Every individual, like a flower," and I burst into tears, feeling the purity of my "flower-self" seen and acknowledged in a way that I never even recognize in myself, let alone another. And yet, when all is said and done, we are all co-existing in a great, beautiful and multi-colored, infinite field of...well, yes, flower-children! (It is the anniversary of Woodstock, after all!) May all beings water, weed and tenderly care for our shared, global garden, and may you, Gabrielle, get well soon and resume your work as a Master Gardener.

"Suzanne takes you down..."

Eliezer Sobel — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:21:49 +0000

No, not that Suzanne; not Leonard Cohen's lady by the river whose perfect body he touched with his mind. My Suzanne is a 96-year-old woman I visit in a nursing home once a week, whose body is somewhat less than perfect: she is blind, wheelchair-bound due to crippling arthritis, and sharp as a tack. My visits with her began as part of a yearlong training I participated in to become an instructor of Gabrielle Roth's 5 Rhythms^TM movement practice. We were asked to contribute 48 hours of community service during the course of our training. But it was obviously a trick; I wasn't about to tell Suzanne at the end of the training that our time was up. Looking back, it's clear that I was committed to her for life from day one, for in a very short time she went from being my "service requirement" to becoming my friend.

Suzanne has a far better grasp of history and geography than I do, and can recite obscure poetry from memory. The aria from Madame Butterfly moves her to tears, and she conducts it with her arms. Lately I've been reading Bitter Lemons aloud to her, Lawrence Durrell's memoir of his travels in Cyprus, a book she loved 40 years ago; she is still able to direct me to particular passages she wants to hear again. When I'm not around, she devours books on tape, and remembers details to discuss with me when I myself would be hard-pressed to give you even the general subject matter concerning the film I saw last night!

So this is not your typical, over-medicated, glazed-over dementia patient that you often find sitting around in nursing homes staring into space. In fact, she boasts that until very recently, she never took so much as an aspirin for a headache her entire life! Now she reluctantly submits to a bare minimum of pain pills—perhaps one a day—and she also sometimes needs help to fall asleep. But basically, this woman is seemingly indestructible. She has fallen out of her wheelchair several times just since I've known her, once literally landing on her head, miraculously escaping with only a huge lump and a purple and blue face, but nothing worse. Suzanne always puts on her prettiest outfits on the days I visit, as well as lipstick and perfume, and relishes the Hershey bar and fresh fruit or other treats I bring, as she can't stand the food at the nursing home; she says it's all white.

But today everything changed. Instead of finding her sitting in her chair, freshly coiffed and eagerly awaiting our visit, I discovered her lying in bed, in diapers, moaning in pain. Loudly. She was clearly mortified to have me see her like that and shouted me out of the room immediately. I inquired with the director about what happened, and learned that, once again, Suzanne had fallen out of her wheelchair, this time while attempting to negotiate the transition into her bed. Thus far, x-rays had revealed nothing broken, but a blood clot had been discovered incidentally.

I know: it seems unthinkable that a 96-year-old blind woman, confined to a wheelchair, would be getting herself in and out of bed on her own, but that is very simply the reality of this and probably most nursing homes: there just aren't enough aides to provide the necessary care for everyone on the unit, every minute of the day. Suzanne has told me of many evenings when she has rung her bell and shouted for help for well over an hour without getting a response. She has no family to advocate for her, no money for better care, and sadly, no options or power over her own destiny at this point. I do what I can for her as a volunteer, but it's a drop in the bucket, and meanwhile, I have my own family horror story to deal with.

My mom, 85, has advanced Alzheimer's, getting noticeably worse daily, and is still living at home being cared for by my Dad, also 85, and also getting worse, in terms of caregiver stress, burnout and frustration. He has several aides come in for a few hours on most days, but he is still doing all of the shopping and cooking, despite the fact that Mom refuses nearly all foods except salami, French fries and ice cream. My brother and I live four hours and seven hours away, respectively, and though we try to visit as often as possible to help out, it is not nearly enough, and meanwhile, every day brings another sad story, but I'll spare you the details; there are five million Alzheimer's patients out there, and fifty million sad stories a day.

Well okay, maybe just one, because at least this one contains an element of humor: Mom was standing directly outside the bathroom door, asking where the bathroom was. (This was several years ago, when she could still formulate questions.) We called out to her that the bathroom was immediately to her right. She looked to her right and saw the laundry hamper that stands just outside the bathroom door. She opened the hamper, sorted through the dirty clothes, then called out, "There's no bathroom in here!" When I relayed this story to my cousin, the son of my mother's brother who is also stricken with the disease, he emailed back, "By any chance, when your Mom was looking through the hamper for the bathroom, did she happen to come across my Dad's car?"

But lately the stories aren't the least bit funny anymore, and despite my Dad's repeated refrain, learned from an old army buddy, that "Better days are coming," the fact is, my already-limited supply of optimism has been severely challenged lately; the trajectory of life is just not looking great to me at the moment. Even my own peer group has, seemingly overnight, gone from being youthful baby boomers to a bunch of guys constantly speaking of chronic pains, undiagnosed ailments, mysterious lumps and rashes, insomnia, and very real cancers of the skin, breast, ovaries, penis and lung, not to mention major financial crises and worries all around. As the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is upon us, I seem to be hearing much more about colonoscopies than Jimi Hendrix, (unless of course, it is the well-known specialist, Dr. James Hendrix of Sloan-Kettering.)

As for me, if I can keep my brain chemistry afloat two days in a row, I count my blessings. (And thankfully, I have many.) My grandmother used to constantly remind all of us that "Youth is wasted on the young." Later on she switched to a German phrase, repeating it endlessly: "Yungevesen unt altegevorden," which means, "I was young, and I got old." That is perhaps the most succinct, Buddhist summation of the nature of life I've ever heard. It covers the whole damned thing! I never truly believed it would apply to me, but I reached my 57th birthday a few weeks ago and if I'm interpreting events correctly, apparently I too was young, and I too am now getting old. If you don't believe me, ask my joints. Any of them—big toes, knees, fingers, you name it.

The cup-half-empty people would generally quote Dylan Thomas at this point in the discussion:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The half-full folks might do better to pick up a book written by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi some years ago, called From Age-ing to Sage-ing. I resisted reading it all these years, because as far as I could tell, it didn't apply to me; until a few weeks ago, I wasn't quite age-ing yet.( And I will also, for the moment at least, skip Shirley Maclaine's more recent book, with the not-so-novel title, Sage-ing While Age-ing. What was she thinking? Now she has me considering writing a novel called Punishment and Crime.) However, since Amazon allowed me to read the first few pages of Reb Zalman's book, I liked what I heard and finally broke down and ordered it. He writes, "Aging doesn't mean diminishment or exile from the ranks of the living. As the period from which we harvest the fruits of a lifetime's labor, it gives us the panoramic vision from which spiritual wisdom flows...[but] people enter the country called ‘old age' with fear and trembling. Feeling betrayed by their bodies and defeated by life, they believe they're condemned to lives of decreasing self-esteem and respect...they expect to suffer from reduced vigor, enjoyment and social usefulness."

Uhhh, yes, exactly! That's precisely what I'm starting to get wind of, even though both Buddha and my Grandmother warned us that this was coming a long time ago!

"Elders," on the other hand, says Schachter-Shalomi, can move from merely age-ing, (and hopefully tone down the rage-ing) and instead enter a process of "sage-ing," which is to consciously evolve into their role as "wisdom-keepers who have an ongoing responsibility for maintaining society's well-being...they are pioneers in consciousness...Serving as mentors, they pass on the distilled essence of their life experience to others."

Yet meanwhile, I'm seven years past due on my AARP membership, on general principle. I'd rather pay more for my hotel rooms than join a club like AARP for old people, and then, to add insult to injury, they want to give me a free tote bag for joining. Did I ever once need a tote bag in my youth? Who was toting anything? Toking, maybe. And if I had to tote, I was always the guy, and still am, with the colorful Tibetan hand-woven bag slung over my shoulder. I also adamantly refuse to pick up the local free paper called "Fifty Plus." I guess I'm in denial; I want to believe that 57 is the new 17, minus the acne. After all, I'm still trying to sort out what I will be when I grow up. But after visiting my friend Suzanne today in the nursing home, and after making my daily SKYPE video call home to the folks, and after popping four Advil to chill out the inflammation in my joints, I finally figured out exactly what I will be when I grow up: old. As for whether I merely age, defiantly rage, or gracefully sage, the verdict is still out.

What Really Matters?

Eliezer Sobel — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:42:31 +0000

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: 
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" 
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, 
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
--Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Time is on my side."
--Jagger

"Time, that great eater of Time."
--me!

The Batesville Day Parade in Batesville, Virginia is a throwback to an earlier time. The mayor usually drives by on his power lawn mower, the local church group throws candy from their "Jesus Loves You" float, a slightly scary militia movement marches by with flags and weapons, twelve-year-old Little Ms. Albermarle County wears a crown and waves from a high-rider...and then there was us, the Sufi-Buddhist-Jewish hippies who had integrated ourselves into the community.

Our contribution to the parade never failed to raise eyebrows and generally won the "Most Creative and Unusual" ribbon each year. Once, my friend Asha marched inside a refrigerator box that we had transformed into a giant Grandfather Clock. I walked alongside her, and would approach the people lining the streets and ask, "Do you need any extra time?" and then hand them their prize: 8" circles of construction paper, numbered like clocks, and labeled as "Free Time," "Extra Time," "Spare Time," "Lots of Time," and so forth. When I ran out of circles, I began telling spectators, "Sorry, I'm out of time," or "I've got no more time."

I believe we were making some sort of profound statement about the nature of Time, but we left it to the bystanders to figure out exactly what the message was. But I can elaborate on it here, some twenty years later, now that all that parade hubbub has died down. Father William McNamara, a Carmelite monk, used to talk about "Holy Leisure," the great art of accomplishing nothing, and it's concomitant, appreciating everything. For when you are so consumed with getting somewhere, the destination becomes more important than the journey, and, as John Lennon reminded us, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." If we miss the journey, surely we've missed the whole trip. And yet the idea of "wasting time" feels like...like, well...it feels like such a waste of time! But if time is precious, what manner of "spending" it most fulfills its promise and purpose?

The Jews figured this one out in their approach to Sabbath, when for 24 hours one does nothing in terms of manipulating reality, producing anything or "becoming," and instead takes a deep breath into pure "being," relaxing into what has been called a "Palace in Time" that is actually outside of linear time. Committed meditators are essentially attempting to enter that Palace on a daily instead of weekly basis, for to spend a few moments free of time is to simultaneously recognize that that itself, paradoxically, is time's greatest use; yet measured by weekday standards, it accomplishes absolutely nothing! (The Zen people have been trying to sell us on Nothing for aeons.) For as the days continue to relentlessly race by, Sabbath provides a weekly respite, a glimpse of the Eternal, imagining that we are looking out over our lives and seeing that the work of our hands is done, and that "it is good." What a relief, yet immediately afterward we wind up the clocks, reset the timers, and come charging out of the gates, once again working way too hard, sometimes with great desperation, to get somewhere that we imagine is far more important than here, and we want to get there as quickly as possible!

The late great Jiddu Krishnamurti pointed out that time is actually the result of thought, or in a way, is thought: in those blessed moments when we drop the mind and enter the "flow" of our experience, or the "zone," all thought disappears and we wake up to the glory of the present moment, unblemished by memory or anticipation. It is only thought, when it enters back into consciousness, that automatically brings time along with it, and re-imposes the linear storyline in which we find ourselves, with all our pleasant recollections and/or laments about the past, as well as our excitement and/or anxiety about the future, all of which had, for a short while, been mercifully absent.

Then, to really confuse me, the Tibetan teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche has advised that, just as we should not be preoccupied with the past or future, we should likewise avoid dwelling too much on the present! A statement like that is liable to send die-hard The Power of Now readers reeling off their meditation cushions, stupefied. His point, I believe, was that the "present" is still a time-based referent. It is a point in the continuum from past to future where we happen to be in any given moment, but it still keeps us on that continuum.

The only way out is through making a sideways, trans-dimensional leap into the Eternal, and that is easier said than done, unless it arrives, as is most often the case, through sheer Grace, one of those rare gifts of awakening when we recognize that our fundamental, true nature is already, eternally free of time's tragic trajectory from birth, through aging to death. We see that we live as if we were actors in a "period piece." Past, present and future are when our story takes place, and we are but "a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage /And then is heard no more." Thankfully, our primordial, essential identity is revealed as prior to all that, impassive witness of it, and therefore ever-relaxed in the Eternal emptiness of a fundamental Being-Awareness that lives forever outside and prior to the tyranny of time. (But who has time to mull over things of this nature?)

For those of us striving to accomplish nothing, Facebook is a great time-waster, but it has redeemed itself lately by putting me in touch with a few people from my very distant past that I had assumed were gone forever. In one instance, I shared a deeply moving exchange with an old friend from my childhood, a woman with whom I'd had no contact for 45 years or more. She happened to be the target of a merciless vendetta I embarked on during our playground years, the object of which was to make her feel as terrible as possible. The only motivation for my behavior that I've been able to fathom in looking back, is that I probably found her beautiful and had a mad crush on her. What better way to express infatuation than through cruelty and torture? (Some of my girlfriends over the ensuing years might argue that it was a technique I continued to employ at times.)

I begged her forgiveness, received it, and we went on to catch up. She Googled me, looked at my website, and wrote something along the lines of, "Wow you're so accomplished! I'm the greatest underachiever of all time." As her story unfolded, it became clear to me that this was a grossly inaccurate perception on several levels. First, as I've just pointed out, perhaps it is only those who successfully master the skill of Holy Leisure that have truly accomplished anything of genuine, lasting value. Second, you're only as accomplished as you feel. When addressing would-be, first-time authors, I often repeat something I heard somewhere: "Don't expect your book to change your life." When writers are ensnared in the query-letter hell-realm, sending out sample chapters and accumulating rejection slips, they are usually completely certain that if their work were to be accepted for publication, the stars would change directions and rose petals would rain down from the Heavens. I myself ecstatically screamed with joy in my car when I secured the services of a great and esteemed literary agent for my first novel, Minyan, and he stated unequivocably, "We will definitely find a publisher for this book." (Just my luck, he died a short time later, but that's another story; you can read it here.)

Just as it is nearly impossible to convince someone who has never owned a home or a car that those acquisitions will not necessarily provide the happiness they expect; so too, an author has to learn through direct experience, for him or herself,that ageless Zen lesson: "Before publishing, chop wood and carry water; after publishing, chop wood and carry water." Our lives have a life of their own, regardless of our external successes and failures. I actually had a friend whose books once occupied both the number one and the number two slots on the New York Times best-seller list in the same week! He told me that it incidentally happened to coincide with one of the most deeply painful and difficult emotional periods of his life. Clearly, there simply isn't a meaningful, qualitative shift that occurs in our lives due to any outside source or achievement. We bring our sense of satisfaction and accomplishment into life; we can't hope to extract it from the events that happen out there. So if in the eyes of my old friend, I looked extremely "accomplished," in my own view, to borrow a phrase she used about herself, "I can barely use a spoon."

Her own story was that she had been inseparable from her younger brother when growing up, and when she was 20 and he 17, a wave snapped his neck and made him a quadriplegic for life, and she a lifetime caregiver, not only of him, but eventually of both her parents as well. She described beginning her day-for decades--at 5 am, in order to go and help him before going to her own full-time job, then returning each night to drain his kidneys. She sat long hours and days by his bedside during his not infrequent, prolonged hospital visits, since he was unable to even ring for a nurse. Between her brother and parents, she described herself as handling everything: "...finances, emotional needs, living arrangements, groceries, overseeing their medical care, hiring doctors, terminating others, underwear, making them feel safe when it seemed impossible... my father had Parkinson's Disease for over 45 years, and my mom functioned with only 23% of her heart. I was the other 77%."

She went through two marriages in the midst of all this, and eventually stopped working after 31 years when the needs of her family began to demand all of her time, until one by one, she eventually lost all three of them. Her story leaves us with many questions:

Is she "accomplished" or is she an "underachiever"? How do we make that assessment, and based on what system of values? Which weighs more on the What Really Matters scale, a life of selfless, loving service to loved ones, or a couple of published books? How do we measure the value of our time, how we spend it, who we share it with, and what "gets done" in a day, a week, or a lifetime? Are we on an ongoing journey of soul-making or a desperate race to carve out a reputation that is only as solid and permanent as that of Shelley's Ozymandias, "king of kings," who was ultimately reduced to the "decay  of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare," beside which "The lone and level sands stretch far away"? Poet Mary Oliver put all of this together into a single, powerful question, that I offer here, by way of conclusion:

"What will you do with your one wild and precious life?"

Contribution & The Fear of Everything

Eliezer Sobel — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:25:36 +0000

Spiritual teacher David Deida has suggested that hidden within our biggest fear lies our greatest gift. The road to our most meaningful and powerful contribution in life often travels through the precise territory we most wish to avoid. I have found this to be true in my case, and I do not consider it to be good news; rather, by definition, I find it to be both frightening and anxiety-producing. I am by nature a somewhat socially phobic, introverted recluse who likes nothing better than staying home in my pajamas on a rainy day. It recalls when I'd be sick enough as a kid to warrant taking a legitimate day off from school, thus saving me from having to feign illness in order to avoid what I perceived as the dangerous battlefield of Warren Point Elementary School in Fair Lawn, New Jersey.

Who was the enemy? All those rough, Gentile kids who liked to spit and seemed to only have last names-Hutchins, Miletti, Himmler--and who seemed to take great pleasure in terrorizing meek-mannered Jewish children like me, who preferred to read during recess rather than participate in the insanity of dodgeball, an insane game in which the strongest and most athletic kids seemed to take sadistic pleasure in throwing a ball unbelievably hard and fast directly at my head from only a few feet away. Not my game. Rather, I was among the nerdy, brainy ones our teachers constantly praised, scribbling "A++, Great work!!!" across every homework assignment, and practically deferring to us as if we were visiting Talmudic scholars at a Yeshiva. It must have been extremely annoying. I would have wanted to beat me up. (Sadly, I have, and do.)

Thus if it is true that our greatest gift is buried inside our biggest fear, for me that always seems to involve leaving the house. Apart from writing, virtually every meaningful thing I've ever done that has made any genuine contribution to others has required my not only getting dressed and getting out, and not only actively engaging with all sorts of people that make me anxious to the point of dripping with nervous sweat, but to actually assume leadership positions. Again and again, I am asked to step forward and do exactly the very things that terrify me most, and almost always it involves being in front of roomfuls of people. As a result, there just isn't anything I'm half-way good at that doesn't cause me to have knots in my belly for about a week beforehand, not to mention neglecting to actually breathe for days at a time. Forget about sleep. (When I met my wife, she was a practitioner of an alternative healing modality called "Transformational Breathwork." I was the first person she was unable to respirate, and it effectively caused her to end her career and go mainstream, now working toward a Ph.D. in Psychology in a last-ditch effort to cure me.)

Much soul-searching over the years has revealed to me that my incessant fearfulness is likely a direct descendent of my mother's cellular terror of the "other," after barely making it out of Nazi Germany as a young girl. As a kid, this inherited condition simply labeled me a "scaredy cat" or a "chicken." As I got older, it was reframed by professionals with the more legitimate-sounding title, "Generalized Anxiety Disorder." (A more appropriate name, I think, would be "Being Alive Syndrome.") Yet over the years, whatever gifts and talents I have been given have demanded that I continually face, feel and act in spite of my fears, and I've just never been happy about it. It's kind of similar to the way that all the fun things to eat are bad for you; just one more of life's practical jokes.

I felt a little consoled when I learned that some of our greatest performers--I believe this is true of Barbra Streisand, for one--still throw up before every performance, despite a lifetime of success and adoration from fans. That made me feel a little better about the fact that none of the available options in the therapeutic supermarket have been able to touch this particular malady of mine, and I've run the gamut of available approaches--Primal, Gestalt, Object Relations, generic talk therapy ad nauseum, and an assortment of others; nor have pharmaceuticals or spiritual practices made any dent in this particular area.

It always astonishes me to learn that mine is not a universal problem, that there are actually some people--maybe even you--who simply wake up in the morning without a deep sense of dread and foreboding, and go about their business, as if living is no big deal. Actually, come to think of it, I live with one of them. After a few sips of her morning coffee, Shari is apt to spontaneously perform one of her faux-Bob Fosse dance routines while I'm still groggy, grumbling, and trying to psych myself up to encounter another day on earth. (The dance routines do help, I have to say.)

My friends will substantiate that virtually nobody has gone to more extreme lengths than I have in seeking a solution to this fundamental, raw discomfort with simply inhabiting a human form on this planet. I spent my obligatory six months in India and Thailand, sitting before the spiritual great ones, both known and hidden. (See photo, above; that's me, sitting between Ringo and the Maharishi, in my "George Harrison" get-up). I put in my time in the Brazilian jungles ingesting ancient, powerful shamanic brews (ayahuasca) that had me vomiting my guts out continuously for three weeks, which is actually an expected part of the purging process leading up to visionary states. My visionary states, however, were limited to vivid images of my mother saying, "For this you paid money? You call this a vacation? You can throw up at home, for free." I've sat alone in secluded mountaintop huts for 40 days and 40 nights, and camped out atop Mt. Sinai conversing with a maddeningly silent Old Testament God who, though once spotted there by Moses, apparently summers in the Negev. My list goes on and on. (Read all about it here.)

As a music composition major in university, I wrote and arranged pieces requiring up to 30 instrumentalists to perform, and after suffering through the agony of having to personally request 30 people to come to rehearsals, I decided to only write piano works that I could play myself, and quit music school soon after. Again and again, throughout my life, I would either withdraw from those situations that provoked extreme anxiety, which resulted in making my life smaller and deader--or I would suck it up, tighten my belly, assume a presentable face, maybe pop a Xanax, and step forward, into and through them. Whenever I did the latter, I almost always met with success, appreciation, positive feedback and acknowledgement, as well as an inner sense of gratification that my life seemed to have left a positive mark in some small way on the lives of others. And all it required was my doing exactly the opposite of what I felt like doing. So much for "trusting your feelings." (Don't.)

Most of us would like to think that our being alive has made a difference. If David Deida is correct, often the most powerful and positive impact we can make is locked behind the iron gates of our deepest reluctance and fear. There was a book I never read entitled Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway--(as with most self-help books, reading the title is sufficient. Just consider Be Here Now. That title alone should have saved us years of further reading.) The implication is that we are not given the option as to whether we will be afraid, we are only given a choice about what we will do in the face of fear, which is the definition of courage. The brave ones among us are not without fear, they are heroically able to take action in the presence of it.

Finally, what if, as some have said, that it's not so much that we all want to make a difference, but that, like it or not, we actually already do make a difference, inherently, and therefore all of our choices matter, about what we do and how we are and who we're being every moment of our lives. What if when we engage the world, whether in mundane or more grandiose ways, we are participating in the "Butterfly Effect," in which each flap of our wings--every word we utter, every random act of kindness or its opposite--ripples out across and through the universe in ways we may never understand or recognize. And each time we step into, instead of shy away from, what scares us, it may seem as if we're walking into darkness and there is no light at the end of the tunnel; but that is because the light, always, is at this end. The light is who's looking.

____________

The Power of Context

Eliezer Sobel — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:33:47 +0000

In my early twenties, I worked one summer as a security guard at Alexander's Department Store and I learned the power of uniforms. On the day prior to beginning work, I got locked out of my car in the Alexander's parking lot and frantically went to ask the security guard to help me break into my car. "No problem, sir," he said, grabbed a coat hangar, and opened my car door in under five minutes.The next day, my first day on the job, a distraught woman approached me, locked out of her car. I was now the one in uniform, and it somehow magically conveyed skills I had lacked only a day before. "No problem, ma'am," I said with a certain confidence, if not bravado, and easily broke into her car with a coat-hangar.

After some months on the job, I learned how much power my guard uniform really had, when I was required to frisk a kid who was about my age, nabbed by the store detectives for shoplifting. I had never frisked anyone before, apart from several girlfriends, none of whom were armed with anything more dangerous than breasts and various other female body parts (and I was too young to recognize that those could also be used as powerful weapons). As I patted down the young man, I was smiling, thinking that it was a game, like the guys on TV, until I noticed the look of utter terror on his face. It suddenly dawned on me that he didn't know I was just some other kid; no, he was seeing a cop. (Huh? Me? A cop? It didn't compute.) So I quit.

The power of a uniform was even more astounding when I did a residency as a lay hospital chaplain many years later, in a university medical center in the Bible Belt, where all the patients were Christian. I was the first Jewish person they had ever hired, and my colleagues were a Presbyterian reverend, a Mennonite minister, a Seventh Day Adventist pastor--I never learned the difference between a minister, a reverend and a pastor--an Episcopalian seminarian, an Apostles of Christ Holy Roller Pentacostalist, a Methodist, a Baptist and a minister of the United Church of Christ. Who knew the Gentiles had so many sub-committees? I was raised to believe there were only two general categories: Jews and Everybody Else.

On the very first day, they put me in a white chaplain's coat and sent me out to visit patients, and I discovered that donning the white coat instantly bestowed on me extraordinary spiritual powers in the eyes of the devout and infirm. (My brother dubbed this phenomenon, "McChaplain.") It was as if there was God, then Jesus, and then somehow I was next in line, and clearly presumed to have a direct hook-up to both God and Jesus. And God knows, I am really not the guy to talk to if you want to get a message through to Jesus.

Nevertheless, just as the security guard uniform really did empower me to actually be a security guard, and do the things that security guards do, the chaplain's jacket likewise enabled me to contact that part of me that is in touch with a higher spiritual power, and I found I was actually quite effective in serving as an intermediary for religious people seeking a connection to their God. The fact that I myself was basically a secular-humanist Jew with Buddhist leanings who had dabbled in Hinduism and lived in a Sufi community never seemed to get in the way or pose a problem, although I never went into details about my personal spiritual predilections. I was like the mild-mannered Clark Kent of chaplains, changing into my SuperGod outfit and emerging as someone who could leap toward Heaven in a single prayer.

Another example: I used to lead rather intense workshops at Esalen Institute, and by virtue of the power granted me by the group to be their leader, I found that I would rise to the occasion and be quite masterful at guiding people through what was generally acknowledged by participants to be an extremely powerful and even life-changing workshop experience. And yet, the very next day I would find myself back in the context of my daily life, painfully struggling in my intimate relationship and suffering with my usual assortment of anxieties and bouts of depression.

The contrast between who I was as a competent Esalen workshop leader and who I seemed to be the rest of the time was so dramatic that I found the gap to be virtually intolerable. Then one day I described this dynamic to a close friend and mentor, and she said, "Oh, you're just calling upon the archetype represented by the Magician card in the Tarot deck; it's a specific function, you're not supposed to be like that all the time, only when the situation calls for it." In other words, context is everything, and it literally determines which "me" shows up! I have seen this again and again in various leadership and teaching roles over the years.

But context can also work against us. When I enter a new psychiatrist's office, just by virtue of coming through the door, I become a "psychiatric patient," and that is a box with some very clearly defined parameters that is nearly impossible to get beyond, unless you are fortunate enough to find a psychiatrist who is him or herself able to stand outside the box, and thus defuse the power of a context that is especially potent considering that in order to get reimbursed by insurance companies, doctors are required to assign a diagnostic code from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disoders, (DSM-IV), a book second only to Tarot cards for use in divination.

One of my favorite diagnoses is "Dysthymia," which, according to Harvard Health Publications, is a Greek word meaning "bad state of mind" or "ill humor". They go on to state that dysthymia usually has fewer and less serious symptoms than major depression, but "lasts longer." Great. I have been diagnosed with a "bad state of mind that lasts a long time." Fortunately, as Leonard Cohen once said about his own forays into the world of psychiatry and the study of the great religious traditions, "Cheerfulness kept breaking through."

Ram Dass, a former Harvard psychology professor, used to say that you can only "get as high as your therapist"; as soon as you walk through the door, you are entering a context determined by your counselor's highest vision of who they are, and therefore, who you are and what's possible for you. If they can only see as far as your diagnostic label, it is difficult if not impossible for you as the client to step outside the limiting walls of that box. If you're lucky, you may stumble, as I did, onto someone who's wise to that game. I once asked my last psychiatrist if he was "only interacting with me through the lens of my diagnosis"--which at that time was "Bipolar II Spectrum disorder" (a step up, or maybe down, not sure which, from the guy who had me pegged as a "Borderline" about a decade earlier, a diagnosis which my recent shrink described as "Just so ‘80s")--and to his credit, his response was, "No, I am only interacting with you." Now that is a refreshing, label-free, empowering context that generates unlimited possibilities for discovery and growth. But if you find yourself with a professional who covertly insists you remain true to your diagnostic code, run!

Another situation in which context can be powerful, but not necessarily positive, is within spiritual or New Age groups that center around an idealized, charismatic figure. I attended a retreat with someone like that once, and it rapidly became clear to me that who I was--literally who I was allowed to be--was predetermined by the inherent rules of that context, the primary rule being "the Guru is right about everything, and anything anyone suggests otherwise is obviously a problem of their own ego." It dawned on me that Buddha himself would also have been casually dismissed and scorned if he was in that room and had expressed an original thought or feeling that deviated from the party line. Just by walking in the door, one agrees to an unspoken, unshakeable contract.

It seems pretty obvious that our families of origin are also a context inside of which most of us are often locked into difficult-to-transcend, prescribed roles and ways of being; less obvious, perhaps, is what the late Adi Da Samraj pointed out, that even our intimate partnerships are essentially a cult of two, with its own set of acceptable behaviors and points of view that determine how we show up, or even who we show up as.

And it gets worse: it could even be suggested that the ego itself is a cult of one! We are enslaved to the rules of a charismatic tyrant living inside our own heads, generating a context for our lives that limits both who we can be and who we can become. We are unwittingly the stars of our own private Truman Show! Thus, the spiritual path is a process of recognizing the boundaries and limitations of the context for our lives to which we have unconsciously given our consent; seeing that, like Truman's painted horizon, it is not absolute, solid or real; and choosing to consciously dissolve ourselves inside the realization of what Werner Erhard used to call the "Context of all Contexts," which is kind of a linguistic, ontological nickname for God. And inside a context that vast and spacious, we can be whoever and whatever we want to be.

Virtual Grief

Eliezer Sobel — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:53:26 +0000

George Gurdjieff, the inscrutable Armenian mystic of early last century, insisted that we humans are constantly bearing false witness against ourselves, by glibly using the pronoun "I" to refer to who we are. Rather, he pointed out that careful scrutiny would reveal that this presumably singular person we call "I" is in fact a constantly changing persona simply sharing the same name. An easy example: the "I" that firmly commits to a rigorous diet and exercise regime is a completely different person than the "I" who chooses to spend the following day lying on the couch watching back-to-back episodes of My Mother the Car while binging on Doritos and Milk Duds. Similarly, the "I" who resolves to awaken at 4:30 a.m. to meditate is not the same person that hits the snooze alarm the next morning and rolls over.

One of the vital steps in Gurdjieff's work, therefore, is to become aware of this stream of ever-shifting identities posing as us, trying to pass themselves off as a single unified being, when in fact our lives are being run by an embattled inner committee with no chairperson! Years ago I performed as an actor in Gabrielle Roth's Mirrors Theatre Troupe in New York, and she had us literally name all of these fickle inner characters. In my case, while Danny Depresso often took center stage, he was often overshadowed by Larry Look-at-me, who in turn could easily be supplanted by Wally Worthless. My friend Jay frequently embodied Captain Control, and attempted to order the rest of us about, while Judy Judge stood smugly off to one side of the stage making critical comments about the rest of the cast. Gladys Gorge devoured a box of cookies in under two minutes, and Connie Cling literally climbed up my body and held on for dear life. Through dramatizing all of these inner ego characters, the performers as well as the audience began to recognize and understand the mirage of a central, unchanging "I."

But this was all before the revolution of information technology. Now, in addition to the mass epidemic of Multiple Personality Disorder, we are further burdened with a whole slew of new, virtual "I"s. In addition to my three email accounts, I also have a Skype name, an IChat identity, a land line and cell number, a Facebook page, a primary website, a book website for The 99th Monkey, a personal blog, this Psychology Today blog, and, as an instructor of Gabrielle's 5 RhythmsTM movement practice, there is a page on her website about me as well, containing a completely different bio!

I used to lead a workshop in which I had participants tell their autobiographies in ninety seconds. I always took a turn as well, so over the years I did the exercise dozens of times, and I noticed that my autobiography was never even remotely the same. Of all the events that actually occur in a lifetime, there are those particular ones that, for whatever reason, we still remember. Of those, there is the relative accuracy of our memories, and from that pool there is the additional process of selecting what we actually choose to relate. So our autobiographies are only one version of partially accurate accounts of selective memories of actual events. In other words, a complete fiction!

Likewise, each of my virtual "I"s has a slightly different flavor. My Facebook page, for example, speaks to a wide range of "Friends," ranging from my wife, Shari, and some of my closest, actual friends, to people who I simply can't quite place or remember. Or in some cases, perhaps we met once, or they read one of my books and "friended" me. This obviously colors how and what I present on that page. My personal, "Mostly Silent" blog (named that because I try to say as little as possible as infrequently as possible, so as not to contribute to the great word glut of our times) reveals a somewhat more intimate and confessional "I," whereas this Psychology Today page is strictly for "the public," whoever that is. (If you're reading this, I'm guessing that would be you.)

In any event, I accidentally hit the Delete button on my laptop recently, and lost an entire email account, which included all the correspondence I had deemed important enough to save over the last several years, including extremely important notes to myself, reminding me of vital things that, no surprise, I can now no longer recall at all. In a similar vein, my friend Alisun wrote me about her husband last week: "I'm not sure if you know this, but Marty has taken to calling himself throughout the day. I'll be working at my desk, his phone will ring, the machine will pick up and I will hear Marty's voice saying things like, ‘Measure the tub' or ‘Check Brian Wilson album.' Sometimes when I'm feeling playful, I will call his machine after one of these messages and say, "Kiss your wife' or ‘Sweep the kitchen.' The real hoot is that sometimes he can't understand what he's saying and he'll call me in to listen to HIM on his machine and figure out if he's saying ‘Get coffee' or ‘Eat hot wings.' As a result of this he now speaks v*e*r*y clearly and enunciates all his syllables, as in, ‘G-e-t pa-per to-wel-s.'" (And my friend Eddie, who was living with his girlfriend at the time, once called in to hear his messages, and went into a jealous rage when he heard a man's voice speaking inappropriate intimacies to his partner, bordering on lewd. Yes, it was a message he himself had left a few days earlier.)

When I realized my entire email account was lost, I went through Elizabeth Kubler Ross's well-known Five Stages of Grief, mourning the loss of one of my virtual "I"s. Stage One is "Denial"; I was certain I'd be able to "undo" the deletion, and retrieve all my mail. It couldn't possibly, really, all be gone, could it? Nah. Yes, it could, and it was. I moved into Stage Two, "Anger": I began to hyperventilate and it required all my strength to resist hurling my computer onto the floor and smashing it into bits and bytes. Then "Bargaining": in the ordinary grief process, one bargains with God; in my case, I began devising schemes involving supervisors in Apple Tech Support in Bangalore, then imagined myself pathetically begging at the Genius Bar in the local Apple Store, and finally, composed elaborate missives in my mind to Mr. Jobs himself. I eventually landed in Stage Four, "Depression," facing and feeling the reality and gravity of the loss, and then mercifully, finally relaxed into "Acceptance," and said my good-byes to that particular "I" forever.

There is an old Hasidic tale which I will surely butcher, but you'll get the idea: A man feels crowded in his tiny home, and when he asks his Rebbe for advice, the Rebbe tells him to bring a donkey into the house. The following week he is even more beside himself, feeling like he can hardly breathe or move in his own home, and the Rebbe instructs him to bring seven goats in. The following week it's half a dozen chickens, then two sheep. Finally, at the end of his rope, the man pleads with the Rebbe for a solution to his intolerable situation, and the Rebbe suggests that he get rid of all the animals. He does so, and instantly feels a luxurious excess of room and space. He can relax and breathe free at last.

It is the same with our Virtual "I"s. On a recent vacation in Mexico, Shari and I opted to leave our cell phones and computers behind, and as we boarded the plane, in less than a millisecond, I felt a huge release and an exquisite sense of inner spaciousness, a nearly mystical experience of immense freedom in my mind and soul. I had thrown all the chickens and goats of my virtual "I"s out the door, and my spiritual house was, for the moment, blissfully empty. Even Gurdjieff would have been impressed.

Who's The Crazy One???

Eliezer Sobel — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:07:49 +0000

There was an episode of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry felt it necessary to discontinue therapy as a result of running into his therapist on the beach and seeing him wearing a thong bikini. Not quite as dramatic, last weekend my wife and I pulled into the parking lot at our local pool; Shari went in ahead of me and unwittingly set up our spot right next to the new psychiatrist I had just started seeing, primarily for a meds consult.In our first session, however, when I mentioned that I was also seeking a psychotherapist, he declared himself a "One-Stop Shop," and told me that he'd been trained as an old-fashioned, lie-on-the-couch, Freudian psychoanalyst. Since psychoanalysis normally requires three to five sessions a week, I knew it would be way beyond my typical mental health co-pay. Nevertheless, since he was presenting himself as more than merely another Eli Lilly franchise, I began sharing the details of my intimate story with him, drawing on my years of experience and skill as a professional client.

Then his cell phone rang.

And then he actually answered it, after a word of explanation to me: "It's my residents." As if I would think, Oh, it's your residents, then by all means, of course you have to take the call! When his conversation was over, he explained that had he not taken the call, he would have had to play phone-tag all day, and his residents would have "freaked out." Furthermore, he said, I shouldn't feel slighted, and I too should feel free to take calls during our sessions, and in that way, it would be a win-win situation. Oh, sure, I thought. I'll take an hour out of my day and pay you a fee, open myself up and pour my heart out, and then stop midstream to either listen to you talk to your residents or else take a call myself from my friend Marty in California, who is usually apt to call in the middle of the day to ask me if I've ever heard the solo album by the deceased Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, or something equally urgent. No, I don't think so.

Fortunately, my brother is a psychologist, my brother-in-law is a psychiatrist, and therapists, counselors and social workers abound among my close circle of friends, so I did a quick e-mail poll about the incident. I received responses ranging from my brother's unequivocal advice that I "Dump him immediately. It is unethical and unprofessional," to my take-responsibility-for-everything Landmark Forum friend who said, "You can use the situation to look at your own feelings about it, and negotiate an adult relationship with him." Several others suggested that I think of him solely as a medication dispenser, not a therapist, and just roll with it for now. I opted for the negotiation approach, and called him to request that, barring emergencies, he not take phone calls during our sessions, and he agreed.

But then I saw him at the pool (thankfully, not wearing a thong.) His only interaction with me there was an attempt at humor: "I'm on call, so my beeper might go off while I'm at the pool," sort of making light of my request, which some of my poll-people would have undoubtedly deemed inappropriate as well. The rest of the afternoon we managed to act as if the other didn't exist, even as we kept swimming by one another. I was practicing using my snorkel mask, so I mostly saw him from the neck down, underwater, and found myself thinking of him as a rare, tropical "Therapy Fish."

The whole incident brings to mind some of the other odd experiences I've had with mental health professionals over the years. I fired my most recent psychiatrist of three years when he consistently failed to return phone calls, offering the rather lame excuse, "I have 500 clients, and there's only one of me. I have to triage the calls, and you didn't say you had a gun to your head." Using his logic, for awhile I actually liked when he didn't return my calls, because that meant I obviously wasn't in great need and was doing a lot better than I thought. I also liked him because he was clearly making things up as he went along. For example, I once called him in a panic during a rough stretch and he informed me, "What you're going through is WAY BEYOND a medication solution. You'll just have to ride the wave of your emotions." When I next saw him in person, however, he said, "Don't give up on drugs, there are lots of them we haven't tried yet." So I said, "But on the phone you said I was WAY BEYOND a medication solution." He looked puzzled for a moment, then explained, "Oh, I must have been in a different mood that day." Just my luck, the man who is supposed to be monitoring my mental health is a MOOD-SWINGER!

Shari and I once saw a couple's counselor who had his bare feet stretched out in front of him, pointed toward us, up on a coffee table, as he stroked a big German Shepherd with one hand, and with the other continuously ate pretzels from a huge jug. At least he offered us some pretzels, but we declined, and when we left his office we did the math: at $150 a week, we could save ourselves $600 a month by not seeing him, and instead just try to be nicer to one another. It worked.

Then there was the eccentric but brilliant psychiatrist I saw in Big Sur, California. For our first, get-acquainted session, we met outdoors, sitting on the grass, while he casually masturbated his male dog, and later offered to spank me, but apart from those minor quirks, he was quite good at what he did. And
in last week's piece I referred to the obese female therapist at Esalen Institute who once sat on my head for 20 minutes so I could "re-experience being smothered by my mother." (I try to find a reason to mention this in everything I write, as it always gets a laugh. It's kind of like a public speaker who uses the same opening joke every time because it never fails to win the audience over. The "sitting on my head" bit is gold.)

Other therapists I have known and loved? Donald, the gay pastor, who told me he hadn't realized he was gay until he was 44, when his father died. I was 29 at the time, and that single passing comment left me acutely aware of my father's health ever since, and I'm going on 57. One sneeze from my Dad can launch me into homosexual panic. He also dominated our sessions with stories about himself, and it got to the point where I would have to interrupt him to say, "I'm afraid our time is up for today."

Then there was Gabriel, the former belt manufacturer-cum-primal therapist, who, when he wasn't doing therapy, rented out his loft in Greenwich Village to a pornography studio, a fact I discovered when I came in one day between sessions to drop something off for him, and discovered my friend Jeannie from our group, naked, on all fours, performing various acts that should have been illegal. They were actually between shots, and Jeannie paused the action for a moment to wave to me from across the room. I waved back. Gabriel, meanwhile, was suggesting to the director that they use me for the next scene, disguised as a Hasidic Rabbi at whorehouse. I turned the offer down, and got kicked out of therapy soon after, ostensibly for my refusal to take my pants off in group. How do I manage to find these people? It's a gift, I think.

My first real spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, himself a former Harvard professor of psychology, used to explain that while one's true, essential self was eternally pure and whole, our temporal personalities might still need the occasional tune-up, and he referred to therapy as "fender and body work." Implying, I think, that as long as your engine is in good working order, the rest is merely cosmetic. I suspect he might agree now that the relationship of personality to essence is a bit more complex and interdependent than that, but one thing remains certain: when getting fender and body work, it is always wise to get several estimates up front!