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Posted in Current Essays, Featured Essays, SageWoman | May 4th, 2011 by Ann

First published in “Crone Eyes, Crone Heart column, in SageWoman, # 80 (Spring 2011)

Ever since menopause, I have had spells where I snap into wakefulness somewhere between two and three in the morning and remain awake — the interior of my body surging with a weird energy — for up to three hours. These insomniac spells tend to last for weeks or even months.

I choose not to take sleeping pills. Instead, I am finding my own way, and in the process making discoveries, some of them far-reaching, even life-changing.

As a long-time “awareness practitioner,” within the past year I’ve developed the capacity to actually notice, i.e., consciously witness, my mental and/or physical state during or immediately following the moment when I snap awake at night.

These states vary. For example, sometimes I wake up in a body/mind state of internal static, like a radio dial stuck between stations. More often, I wake up in a mental state of anxiety, even panic, with body tensed, poised for fight or flight. And sometimes my body feels paralyzed — by what I can only call dread. Here, panic’s “fight or flight” has withdrawn from the limbs to concentrate in the solar plexus/heart area — where a thousand pound weight seems to be pulling this command central of my nervous system down into a black hole abyss.

Rather than trying to squash or distract myself from these acutely uncomfortable, even painful feelings, I attempt to stay present. Rather than identify with the static, or anxiety, or panic, or dread, I ask that another “I” — the larger awareness that witnesses whatever “I” am going through — remain with the feeling and, in the process, sink below it into spaciousness. In this way, in nearly the same moment as waking from sleep, I also ask to awaken in this larger sense. For when the first shift of state (waking from sleep) yields to the second shift (awakening), then no matter how much the strong and unwelcome emotional state threatens to overwhelm, this larger, impersonal “I” (eye, aye!) of awareness attends the pulsations of strong feeling as surface waves upon the ocean of being.

This capacity for near-immediate double awakening from deep sleep has taken years of practice. Only within the past nine months has it even begun to bear fruit. And it’s still hit and miss! This is no surprise.

Like all incorporated souls undergoing experience from “birth” until “death” as an earthling, my awareness is focused through a dense physical body that utilizes five “outer” senses and a conscious mind formed by and encapsulated into a three-dimensional cultural framework that allows for only certain possibilities as real.

(What a hilarious thought, that the mysterious, open-ended, interdimensional omniverse in which we are immersed as droplets in an infinite ocean of being could or would consent to be captured by the picayune mental gyrations of the grid-seeking, linear-leaning, polarity-bewitched human left brain! And be aware: the dominant culture still equates this left brain capacity of the conscious mind with the self and views this ego-self as the source of all personal value.)

The programmed body/mind ego-self automatically funnels and locks the larger awareness into whatever happens to be the current wave of strong feeling triggered by internal or external events/“causes.” The programmed body/mind ego identifies with — for example, in the case of sudden middle-of-the-night wakefulness — panic, and moves immediately into readiness for action, “fight or flight.” Ego-“I” then instantly and automatically cathects the tension of extreme physical/emotional stress into ideas, “reasons” to “justify” and/or “ignore” the panic.

As a crone with nearly seven decades under my belt, I’ve had plenty of time to witness the near-continuous ebb and flow of feelings, and their ever-arising mental seductions that aim to disguise, deny, interpret, justify, critique, amplify, project them into something other than what they are, feelings! At this point, rather than identify with the contents of mental seduction, the instant ego-mind-“I” pops out one of its endlessly proliferating ideas, this larger I is usually able to — right then! — see through it to the feeling it was an attempt to disguise. The feeling is. I allow the feeling. I honor the feeling, give it permission to expand.

I have learned that if I fully allow a feeling, then, as it expands, it dissipates! Like everything else, feelings are impermanent, they dissolve and let go.

Daytime visitations of fear and panic last momentarily; I can easily invoke witness consciousness to see through them and let go — to remember myself as a spiritual being having an all-too-human physical experience. But these post-menopausl middle of the night visitations are another matter. The immersion into a continuous state of panic can endure for hours, during which the urge to invoke ego mind to squash the panic with “reasons” arises again and again. Again and again, I ask to wake up, allow the feeling in, watch it disappear into spaciousness.

I should say that this is what I do when I am willing to practice awareness, right then and there. If not, I’ll do what many insomniacs do, turn the light on and read (others get up and “do” something). But if, after 20 minutes or so, I’m still not sleepy, I’ll turn the light off and lie on my back, one hand on my heart, the other on my solar plexus — and ask gently for release.

This attitude is new. I used to rail against nightly interruptions, my resistance fueling the frustration of being unable to sleep. Identifying with my nerve-wracked state, left-brained mind would, just as in the daytime, instantly concoct an overlay of “reasons” why I felt that way. Like a wild horse, mind would rear up and gallop off, flinty hoofs sparking ideas one after another, and another, and yet another — endless causal chains of ideas, for or against, this or that.

At this point, my wrestling matches with insomnia remind me of my experience as a Catholic kid during Mass. It was hard to kneel and “pray” without juggling my knee and running off somewhere in my mind; it’s equally hard now lying in bed not to thrash about and wish I were elsewhere.

The difference between then and now is awareness. And with awareness comes the recognition that during these dark nights of outer silence and inner turbulence I am in the presence of the divine This, for me, is key: I have placed the “problem” of insomnia in a sacred context which, in turn, has transformed the meaning of the experience.

Here’s how the shift began.

2 AM, sometime in December, 2009: I snap awake, my entire body hissing. The loud internal shshshshshshsh ignites my body, starts it thrashing. Almost instantly — or is it prior to? simultaneous? — ego-mind clicks on, whines into high gear. Both systems rev up: body “tossing and turning,” throwing itself from one side to the other; mind seesawing between opposites, flashing from what it wants to what it fears.

Inside this cacophony a question arises: “Which comes first, body or mind?” Does the shift in state that wakes me from sleep start with the body’s digestive and nervous system dysfunctioning? Or does the mind’s invisible, culturally conditioned matrix randomly spew polarized pairs of ideas that scissor open the veil of sleep.

In any case, I sense, Descartes had it right. Body and mind do appear as closed systems that occupy different dimensions or frequencies; and moreover, these systems do seem to run parallel. It may be that they arise together at the mysterious interface between form and formlessness, extruding into different densities from a realm beyond. To me, this is an interesting observation, and one that I might not have made were it not for what I am learning to call my partnership with insomnia.

Since that cold December night nine months ago, I’ve discovered that I can focus awareness on either the physical state or the mental state and notice the same tempo. As they arise together, so together, they kaleidoscopically change, yoked to the same rhythm.

I have learned that I can set intention to focus awareness directly into the jaggedy, thrumming nervous system of the physical body, or I can set intention to focus awareness into the mental dynamic that churns out polarized ideas. Either focus works, in that awareness, when I can “hold it,” descends below both physical and mental agitation into spaciousness.

And when I make this my practice, to drop awareness down and remain there, moment by moment into duration, below the wriggling body, below the galloping mind, below even the mysterious rhythm that rules them both; when I thus manage to “lose track of time,” then they click off together.

In other words, when I not only wake up from sleep in a literal sense, but when I can consciously awaken from the nighttime sleep state and fly through (or under) the surface phenomena of agitated body/mind into full presence, then within minutes I automatically fall back, relaxed, into unconsciousness. In this way I am healing my lifelong insomniac tendencies.

And, as usual when I find myself beginning to heal a seemingly intractable “condition,” I begin to realize its gift and sense a kind of exaltation that hovers, tantalizing, just out of reach.

Since I am not the kind of person who practices daily seated meditation (I prefer moving meditation: yoga, tai chi, chi kung), this prone-in-the-middle-of-the-night meditation is precisely my cup of tea — but with a twist. For if one of the dangers of sitting meditation is falling asleep, then the biggest danger of prone meditation is not falling asleep! Like a few nights ago, when I awakened into panic around 1:20 AM, and remained there for three hours, in an agitated state and furious, both for being insomniac, and for identifying with my agitated state! I need at least seven hours of sleep; I got maybe six. In the morning my eyes felt scratchy and my nervous system jagged and raw.

Later that morning, while trying to work on this piece, my ears were fiercely attuned to the low, grinding roar of heavy machinery. A 3.5 mile segment of a two-lane road five houses from mine, slated for “improvement” by the state of Indiana 20 years ago, is now, unfortunately, underway. First, 500 trees are coming down. Next, utilities will move water mains and gas lines. Then, INDOT will begin actual construction, widening this road to four lanes, slicing a wide swath through the precious heart of this university town.

My usual work with insomnia is now challenged and intensified with the introduction of this waking nightmare of chaos, destruction, heavy industry, dust, and the prospect of permanently increased traffic and noise when the two-year project is completed.

That’s what had me riled up and insomniac; I was feeling trapped, heavy-hearted, and longing for the star-studded silence of my twenty years in a yurt in the Tetons. I did manage to notice that I was way too identified with my agitation to move into full presence, and so instead I brought up an image of the Dalai Lama, his hard-won equanimity in the face of Chinese obliteration of his Tibetan homeland. And I conjured up Nelson Mandela, his long years in jail. Both enduring seemingly permanent, and very unpleasant, outer world situations. Learning how to live inside them; practicing awareness in hell.

So this, I realize, is my hell, this road construction project and its aftermath. Right here, right now, in this example of the dominant culture’s hungry industrial maw, I must learn to move below what appears to the vast universe that underlies it. Remember, I tell myself, this is all happening on the surface. It is not real, it is an illusion.

Yeah, try telling that to my ears these days, with the grinding, not-so-far-off noise of giant machines picking up whole trees and swinging them aside . . .

Well, so; this . . . is . . . my practice. And I will have plenty of time to work with it. The rest of my life, if I want to stay in this house. Of course, I could move! Escape! Go back to yurt life in Wyoming! Scuttle off to a little cabin in the forest! Take to the desert in an RV! On and on, these thoughts crowded my brain that night, and even now.

And yet, and yet . . . I know that somehow, yes, this is my practice. To find and hold awareness, no matter how difficult the inner or outer environment! To easily and naturally move through the surface phenomena of body/mind agitation into full presence! To embrace even this road-widening project as a gift.

Though I “think” about this road in terms of its two-year construction and the traffic to follow, these are mental programs that I attach to ever-changing phenomena to understand and somehow control, fix in place, if not what happens, then at least my reaction.

And is that not what I’m doing? Trying to control my imploding fury and despair? Well, yes . . .

And yet, I’ve learned that “awareness,” when I can get it and hold it, offers continuous change as a defining feature. For when I try to grasp “it,” it’s no longer there. And when I can “get there,” the interpretations of phenomena break up into, simply, sensations, one after another, with no cause and no consequence, just . . . they are what they are, and what they are is changing, continually, constantly. Nothing stays the same.

So what does it mean to “get it and hold it” — this awareness that all is change, that any internal or external situation is inherently unstable, impermanent, and therefore not worth either grasping or avoiding — if, when I try to grasp this awareness, it’s gone? Because I do want to grasp it. I want to grasp this place of awareness where it doesn’t matter, where I don’t feel sick at heart, where I am at one with all — even this damn road.

As a friend of mine who practices vipassana meditation, noted, “Even if we can get there [to the point of awareness], it’s very hard to hold it.” So the word “hold” here means something very different from what I have been conditioned to expect. It does not refer to any particular state of awareness, or object of awareness.

In other words, it’s hard to stay in the state of continuous presence no matter what; impossible, really, unless “I” (that is, “awareness”) lives somehow beyond or behind or within the phenomena that runs on forever, sticking out from inside or in from outside, tripping me up so that I forget, and once again, get caught up in “what’s happening.”

Until this road snapped me to attention, more and more, I had been experiencing “what’s happening” as an illusion, the movie I and others have called into play, lived as more or less a thin transparent scrim projected from inside the bottomless fountain of what seems to be “inside me” and where “me” dissolves into the vastness. Just as a movie is less real than reality, so reality (as movie) is less real than the infinite, continuous, still presence of Being from within which all forms are born and pass away.

So I guess I should bless this road, for plunging me, once again, into the turbulence of polarity. I am reminded of LSD and its aftermath: first, the unitive flow, hour after timeless hour. Then, whoosh, the let down, as I crashed back into harsh, cold “reality.”

So this is no small thing, this middle-of-the-night insomniac’s exercise. After all, over what else do I have dominion? As I learn how to transform the internal conditions that lead to violence — the instinctive tendency, when thwarted or afraid, to invoke mind to justify blame, revenge, anger against others, and/or shame or guilt against myself, I gain entrance to . . . what is.

Yet there are nights when the dread I awaken into feels so strong and thick, so very stuck and formidable, that I suspect I have locked into something much larger than my puny self can contain. Rather, I sense dread as a powerful current within the collective consciousness, the zeitgeist, that ubiquitous and continuously mutating world wind that infects us all. There is no way to avoid it. The polarizing dynamics of the dominant culture are constantly programming and reprogramming us even as it begins to spin out of control, unraveling. And somehow, despite continuous corporate media and government assurances to the contrary, we all know it.

At some point our conditioned mental mechanisms of denial also dissolve, and the animal part of us kicks in, instinctively and automatically fighting for its own survival. And, unless we do invoke a larger awareness, Darwin was right, only the fittest will survive.

I imagine I’m not the only crone who has recognized the value of building capacity to move into a state of meditation or contemplation of what is amidst the continuous flux of phenomena, no matter how intense the current drama. Nearly seven decades of full-on living through countless experiences of attachment and release, growth and loss, ecstasy and sorrow have tempered my approach to life and gifted me with a perspective that includes them all and continues to expand over time.

As the infrastructure of our socially constructed, centrally controlled civilizational “reality” implodes, enormous energy is releasing. It’s as if a nuclear shock wave is radiating out in slow motion, and the bright-sunburst mushroom energy that follows is the blinding, solar light of human consciousness and creativity, each of us unleashed to find our own unique way without the old constraints. Jobs, homes, work, retirement, money — all that we took for granted vanishes — poof! — in an action-packed, hard-to-remember slow motion blink of an eye. Matter evaporates — into energy.

The equanimity that attends spaciousness is exactly what is needed to invoke a calming effect within the ongoing turbulence.

The inclusiveness that attends spaciousness is exactly what is needed to offer both connectivity and shelter.

Those of us who have lived a long time and learned from our enormous cache of multi-faceted experiences know — that none of us can find our way alone. We are in this together. What happens to one happens to us all.

Crone as refuge. Whoever comes within our expanded aura feels safe, secure, held, as a living, loving expression of being, and thus of intrinsic, inherent value. Nothing and no one is left out. Not even this ill-conceived nearby road-widening project. Those who designed this project, those who pushed it through, those who work on it now — all are members of my world. All of us together have chosen on a soul level to utilize this road-construction-project illusion as a stage to remember who we really are.

The universe is not a collection of objects but a communion of subjects. — Thomas Berry.



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Currently Reading:
Current Essays

Posted in Current Essays, Essays, Featured Essays | January 24th, 2011 by Ann

by Ann Kreilkamp, Ph.D.

Preface

January, 2011. Here we are, already in the second decade of the new century, new millennium, and I, for one, feel astonished to still be here — and waiting. Waiting for the Apocalypse? Waiting for Ascension? In any case, uneasy, and wondering. When will “it” come? And how will I prepare?

In the midst of sensing ourselves in the eye of a collective and telluric and even cosmic storm, most of us are still dealing with old issues that we know intuitively, we simply must release in order to move forward. Especially now, when time is accelerating so dramatically, events piling like dominos, and security systems of all kinds — personal, interpersonal, social and collective — thinning to the point of dissolution.

As an astrologer, I have been aware of the ongoing geometric pile-up of enormous systemic tensions amongst the planets in our solar system and how they impact Earth. I’ve known for years that beginning in 2008, civilizational infrastructures would undergo tectonic shifts that could collapse the entire house of cards.  (And that’s just our local system. Then there’s all the talk of the Mayan Calendar, with its unimaginably long cycles, all said to be ending either in October of 2011 or December of 2012.)

My own response to this prior recognition has been to focus on centering myself to the point of being able to maintain continuous internal balance. In order to do this I need to clear my own biological system to the point where the energy of the universe can flow smoothly through without impediment. As I work to shift my own personal frequency, so that all traces of fear are eliminated as they arise, I ask that I be allowed to serve as a vessel of love spreading equally to all.

It is from within this larger, intensely private context of personal work that I feel impelled to tell this story now. I pray that it may assist others still saddled with seemingly intractable addictions and other habit patterns that appear to disconnect us from the inherent flow of love.

At the heart of my tale is the heartening news that there do seem to be moments when light suddenly, inexplicably, cracks through the thick walls of our old, stuck habit patterns. These moments of grace feel miraculous, undeserved; and yet, when we look back, we recognize that we have been, consciously or not, preparing ourselves all along. So much so, that when grace does, suddenly, illuminate, we are poised to follow through with its astonishing promise.

The Scene

October, 1982. I am 39 years old and my life has, slowly, inexorably, ground down to dust.

Everything I’ve worked for has whirled into the abyss. Three marriages, two children, career as a college professor, several utopian experiments in community — all gone. Vanished. Poof!

Last month, I loaded my little car and moved — to yet another new town, to launch yet another idealistic project with no money, and — tried, yet again, to “stop smoking.”

Each time I try, and fail, the ancient physiological/psychological pattern that grips me tightens. Repeated failure has exposed my essential worthlessness. “You think you can do this? HA! We’ll show you,” snarl the demon dogs of defeat while digging yet more dirt from my already deep grave.

My chronic inability to “quit smoking” has undermind every attempt to jumpstart my life, ignite my original nature, and unfold my unique destiny.

I know all this.

I also know that I can’t quit. That I just don’t have it in me to quit. As my brother-in-law, a few months ago, casually pronounced: “You have the personality of a smoker. You won’t quit. You can’t quit. You’ll never quit.” He said this as a statement of fact. I took it as a terminal insult. And yet, he was right. I had reached the end of my rope. I had to change, and I couldn’t.

The Shift

And here’s where this narrative suddenly accelerates, blasts through the usual three-dimensional matrix. For when I finally admitted to myself that I, my ego, was powerless in the face of this all-powerful addiction, the universe opened to admit the light. Not obviously, and not all at once. Others would never have known. In fact, from the outside it looked like the exact opposite: all of a sudden I started smoking more than usual! Voraciously. With a vengeance.

And yet, here’s what happened internally: at the precise moment when I fully realized that I couldn’t quit, that my ego was just not strong enough to control this horrid habit, I gave up. I stopped struggling and surrendered, handing the responsibility for releasing this addiction to what I called my “Higher Self.”

Looking back, I now recognize that during all those years as a smoker, I was also gradually acknowledging and incorporating this subtle, larger, mysterious aspect of my being within my smoke-ravaged body. In a stealth move, the diaphanous “higher self” had, apparently, burrowed into my body even deeper than the stink of addiction.

Or perhaps the Self had been present all along; and perhaps my conscious confession that I had no way out of the abyss of my despicable addiction was the price of admission. For the abyss, it turned out, was not the abyss! For it was not endless; I did not fall forever. To my utter astonishment, by consciously letting myself be totally sucked in to my smoking habit — with no further attempts to curb it and no time wasted in denial or guilt — I ended up landing on, or in, the Self.

And the Self knew the future; knew that even though “I” — my ego — was still addicted, when that part of me was ready, it would let smoking go. And that moreover, releasing it would be easy.

So that’s where my ruminations ended on that day when I first confessed, and then surrendered, to what seemed, at first, to be a terrifying void. Unbeknownst to me, I had landed in this Self that knew the future. The Self that knew  the ego would wake up,  that it was only a matter of time. Indeed, the awakening process had already ignited, given that my awareness, in the act of knowing, absorbed the ego as a mere point within the seemingly boundless space of its being. This larger, deeper Self didn’t have to be told, or to check with others. External validation, that game played by the ego in the drama of 3-D illusion, was irrelevant. The Self just knew, with a serene, quiet assurance, that all was well.

From that moment on, I, that is, the Self, knew that the job of letting go of cigarettes wasn’t up to me, my ego. That this was a job only the Self could accomplish. So ego-I didn’t have to worry about it anymore, or hate myself anymore. I could smoke as much as I liked, for as long as I liked, while awaiting the miracle, when releasing cigarettes would be easy, a piece of cake, like falling off a log.

I didn’t know how long I would have to wait. It might be three days, or three weeks or three years, or three lifetimes, — and it didn’t matter because, in any case, at some point the larger me knew that the smaller me would jettison this foul habit as way too small for the being that was unfolding, the person I was becoming.

Though validation was neither sought or required, had I been more in touch with the culture at large I would have realized that in my own intensely private, personal process I had stumbled upon the first two steps of Alcoholics Anonymous: 1) admit that you are powerless, and 2) give the problem to a higher power. At the time I was not familiar with this organization’s credo.

I had also stumbled upon the truth of Einstein’s famous maxim: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Or, in the language I dressed it in later: “We cannot solve a problem until we put that problem in a larger context — where the problem is not solved but dissolved.” The Higher Self, in my lingo, was that larger context. I would hand over my addiction to this larger being and know that when the larger “I” had fully prepared the smaller “ego,” then the ego-self would easily release the addiction as a garment that no longer fit. How that would happen, I had no idea. From my ego’s jaded, weary, thoroughly cynical perspective, it would clearly take a miracle, something so radical and shocking as to cleave my life in two.

Meanwhile, I would smoke as much as my ego-self wanted — hell, even more than usual. Rather than trying to hold myself on a tight rein, I would let go of all constraints and all the guilt, and just indulge. So I did.

Meanwhile, and simultaneously, from that moment on, the mysterious event that had propelled this narrative through the 3-D veil continued its work of preparing little ego-me. At first, the process was so subtle that I hardly noticed it. Over the next weeks it gradually strengthened. Without consciously deciding to do so, I began to visualize myself as a snake shedding its skin. Over and over again, conjuring and holding this image, of being a snake, about to shed its skin.

Two months went by. At Christmastime, I traveled to Ketchum, Idaho for the usual strained visit with family. (I had been the first of eight children, the perfect, model child — until I turned 26, when I rebelled against my doctor father’s Catholic ideology and morphed into the black sheep.)

Picture this: Ann, curled into a tense ball on the couch in the parental living room, pretending to read a book. Internally she is counting the days until she can leave. Not smoking in the house (her father forbade it), hasn’t helped her contentious mood.

Shift Again

But then, again, for the second time, this narrative bursts through three-dimensional constraints to materialize an encounter so unexpected and remarkable that it shocked me further into aliveness. Even then I knew: this was the miracle I had been waiting for, the sudden, unexpected event that would cleave reality in two and set me on an entirely new course.

My father walked up to me with the current issue of the Journal of American Medical Association. He handed it to me, opened to a certain page, and said, in a voice unlike his own, “Here. You might want to read this.” Rather than with his usual judgmental tone, my father had approached me seriously but casually; as if I were an equal, a colleague who would appreciate what he had to share.

The article claimed that the process of making cigarettes was radioactive! If this first-ever sensing of camaraderie with my father had already softened my habitual contentiousness, now I was galvanized. For if what the author claimed was true, then continuing to smoke cigarettes would make a mockery of my work as an anti-nuclear peace activist. Instantly, my perspective shifted. I could not tolerate hypocrisy. Either I would no longer smoke, or I would stop being an activist.

It’s hard to describe how liberated I felt in that moment. All of a sudden, I had been yanked from sodden darkness into brilliant light, all senses switched on, heart thrumming and eager. Immediately, I knew exactly what I would do.

A good friend of mine and her husband owned a beautiful house on the north rim of the Snake River canyon, two hours away. The house was for sale, and empty. She had offered to let me stay there anytime. I arranged to be there until driving to Sun Valley for a previously scheduled weekend date.

During those five days I would fast on fresh vegetable and fruit juices, take long walks into the magical canyon, soak in the luxurious hot tub, write in my beloved journal, and listen to soul-stirring music.

I’ll never forget the ritual of smoking that last cigarette, sitting on the beautiful couch in the floor-to-ceiling windowed living room while absorbing surround-sound stereo and watching a pair of eagles swoop over the canyon rim.

And that was it. That truly was it. I haven’t touched a cigarette since.

I followed that last cigarette with the blessed five-day interlude of fasting, walking, soaking, writing, listening, and, just as I had known in advance, releasing cigarettes was easy. A piece of cake. Like falling off a log. For the first time I wasn’t even tempted to furtively scour wastebaskets and street curbs for butts; nor did I need to talk myself out of hopping in the car and going to the 7-Eleven for one more pack. Reality had cleaved in two. That was before. This was after. I was done.

Or was I?

Oops! Should I cancel my Sun Valley date? The man smoked. Of course he smoked. All my friends smoked. That’s the outer environment I had attracted to mirror my inner state. Would I be able to spend an entire weekend with a man who still smoked and not smoke myself?

I decided I would keep the date. For if not now, when? I would have to learn how to hold this inner transformation. Indeed, this was the crucial test. Which would hold value no matter what the external environment, the new me, or the old? Which would prove more uncomfortable, to profoundly disappoint my Self or to create a temporary disruption in the atmosphere with my date? I was about to find out.

The third shift

Sitting down to dinner at the restaurant that Friday evening, we ordered drinks; graciously, he pulled out a cigarette pack and offered me one. That moment when he reached across the table was the third time this narrative suddenly burst through the usual 3-D dynamics. For not only did I refuse, but I, surprised myself for doing so with a grace equal to his offer. Moreover, I did not judge him for smoking.

From that moment on, I intuitively knew that if I did judge him, or anyone for smoking, then I myself would start smoking again. Moreover, I knew that I would be required to continue living in an environment where people smoked for one full year, and not judge them for it. At the end of that year, my circumstances would change. Either those around me would also release smoking or I would find myself in an entirely new situation.

And that’s exactly what happened. All my housemates smoked, and I lived among them, not smoking, and letting go of judgment each time it came up. Moreover, I noticed that judgment was gradually transforming into compassion. As a former smoker myself, I knew that my judgments were nothing compared to theirs against themselves. That like me, they were secretly riddled with guilt and self-hatred.

At the end of that year I was invited to move into a rural yurt community, where no one smoked.

An unusual twist

Meanwhile, it turned out that my higher self had to intervene one more time to help me thread my way through that year’s 3-D cauldron. And this is the part of the story which, quite frankly, I find brilliant! Nor have I seen any other account of redemption from addiction which mentions the technique that my higher Self utilized to assist the shift.

This technique stemmed from an understanding that I had begun to integrate around this same time — that of the “inner child,” as elucidated in The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller’s extraordinary book about the psychological and spiritual consequences of strict, even cruel German child-rearing methods. This book introduced me to the idea that a part of me, the inner child, whom I named “Orphan Annie,” did not get her oral needs met at the appropriate age. (On the day my father left for World War II, my mother weaned me from the breast to a cup. I was nine months old.) The book helped me to recognize that my craving for cigarettes was an unconscious — and consistently, desperately unsatisfying — substitute for that original unmet need.

Recognizing the source of the craving didn’t stop it, but it did help me to understand that the part of me that was addicted was this inner child. And that in order to truly let go of this vicious habit I would need to find something to distract her for awhile. Otherwise she would eventually rebel, insist on getting her way and march right back to cigarettes. It was important that Orphan Annie not feel bereft and ignored; to keep her from feeling abandoned, I would reward her for her sacrifice.

I would allow her to develop another addiction, and keep it for a full year, a habit that would be a welcome substitute for cigarettes and yet (hopefully!) not as addictive. Further, the second addiction couldn’t cost any more than the original one, since at the time I was living on very little money.

So here’s what I came up with: twice a week I would reward my inner child for “good behavior” by taking her out to breakfast, spending the same amount of money that I had spent on pack-a-day cigarettes on a sweet roll. I would allow the new addiction, to sugar. I knew it wouldn’t be that difficult to let go of, since I did so after each Christmas holiday. So now, I would allow the addiction to sugar until the end of the first full year post-cigarettes.

The experiment worked. At the end of that year I easily released the sugar habit.

Looking Back

I still view the release of cigarettes as the biggest accomplishment of my entire life; for it set the foundation. By letting that addiction go I released the continuous undermining of my own self-esteem that had prevented me from unfolding the wonders of my original nature and expanding into oneness with all that is.

Yet the year-long release of cigarettes was just the beginning. I knew I would need to begin to uncover the emotional roots that had crystallized into the physical addiction. And in order to do that, I would have to go back to the beginning, and begin again. I would have to do that “inner child” work mentioned above, to “face, embrace and erase” the deep emotional patterns that had structured my so-called life into a tight little locked box with no key.

Being a perennial optimist, I thought the inner child work might take me six months. Instead, it took seven years — and even now, 30 years later, once in a while I detect traces, tendrils, of fear and constriction that I have learned to breathe my way through . . .

How I did all that is a story for another time. Suffice it to say that I did not go into therapy. I did it myself, with the help of my journal, my dreams, a heightened alertness to the presence of synchronicities, periodic co-counseling with a few close female friends, and my overall commitment to waking up in the present moment, over and over again, to a larger awareness.

Meanwhile, I now recognize that once an addict, always an addict. The structure of my personality in this life is that of an addict. So I have a choice: I can choose “good” (life-maintaining or enhancing) addictions or I can choose “bad” (life-denying or destroying) ones.

I spend two hours in what I call “physical culture” each day: one hour walking with my little dog, and another hour doing a combination of yoga, chi kung and tai chi. I indulge and encourage these “addictions,” plus one more: the continuous strong and prayerful intention to practice awareness of the present moment. Of the now, as it opens into space, the quantum field holding endless potential.

As a result of all this work over the decades, I can truly say that I feel stronger, more flexible, attuned and integrated, than at any time in my long life. Life truly does get better and better, as our awareness widens to encompass more and more of the loving generosity of being.

Luckily, I am one of many who have pioneered this work to clear the body/mind/spirit of  life-denying addictions. As a result, the template for releasing what no longer serves us is in place; this makes it much easier for others to do the same work. It helps to know that the mysterious subtle, sacred realms that lie just on the other side of our usual third-dimensional experience of life can be called upon to aid us at any moment.

Just ask, and ye shall receive.



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Posted in Current Essays | April 20th, 2010 by Ann

ORIGINAL SIN AS ORIGINAL BLESSING: Our Oneness as a Species We Know First in Our Agony

 © Ann Kreilkamp 2004

 Author’s note: Only a few months past the first anniversary of my husband Jeff Joel’s death, I abruptly fell into a year-long karmic relationship with a man whose dominating personality mirrored my own. Unlike my relationship with Jeff, the connection with Vince was sexually magnetic; however, I was forced to learn that Vince’s values and ethics were not compatible with mine. This essay was written about half-way through that period of mutual confusion and suffering.

 Catholics say that we arrive wounded and marked with “original sin” that only baptism eradicates. I say that you cannot get rid of it, that it follows you like a shadow. I tell you my story, of an innocence hurt and crushed. Each of us, if we look within long and deeply enough, re-enters that original wound. The pain started in childhood. Or at birth. Or in the womb. Or in another life. Or even before that. How do you go back to the beginning and not go further back?

 My Story

 I lie in bed, curled around my belly, awareness sucked into the dense black hole that has taken me over and invaded my chest, swallowed my heart and solar plexus. It is a dark night outside, even darker inside me. I gasp for air and my mind flies out.“Up, up and away!”— I must escape this endless nightmare, this obliteration, this flesh pulverized and compressed to its original traumatic imprint.

 “Original traumatic imprint?” my mind, churning, asks. “You mean pain? What pain do you have? And Why? Where did it come from?” To this a larger, more detached part of myself counters, “Does it matter? I spent so many decades deconstructing why I hurt that it bores me. I don’t want to get stuck there. I am not stuck there! I want it over and done!” and yet — not. That original trauma burned into my psyche like a brand. Pain froze me in place and left a lifelong scar.

 Curled on the bed around my own personal black hole, sucked down into my original traumatic imprint, suddenly “I,” that is, my mind, escapes my body. Whoosh! Just like that! Mind flies free for a nanosecond. Then, snap! Shut! — mind traps itself in its own machinations. 

 Inside mind’s self-constructed cage, desperate with questions. “Why pain? Don’t want pain. What happened? Got to figure it out to get rid of the pain.” Mind goes back over that seemingly climactic event, slows down the sequence, tracing it frame by frame. “How did we split off? What part is his, what mine? Will astrology explain the situation, transits to our charts, aspects between them? Buzz, buzz, busy bee mind flashes astrological charts on the wall of imagination, obsessively cross-references, pours over details.

 Mind utterly entranced in this task of fixing, correcting, analyzing, trying to solve this problem. Mind’s trick — ignore the body and what it feels. That usually works. Think! Get busy with some project in the outside world. Or, if body insists, if pain overwhelms, then, as a last resort, ignore the body by crowding the mind with ideas, lots of ideas, ideas that rush in from all directions.

My mind is edgy, nervy, relentlessly churning and turning. On this endless, insomniac night my mind compels me to deconstruct the origins of an abrupt and terrifying break with my new partner. For thirty years I have addressed interpersonal issues with laser-sharp mental analysis. I take pride in my capacity to telescope in on an emotional problem and dissolve it so that I — so that we — can go on. But it’s not working. Not this time. And perhaps it never did. Perhaps what worked in my relationships did so despite my mental prowess, not because of it.

 Vince considers his presence incidental, says my suffering has little to do with him personally. He is right, yet I disagree. My pain does not surface except within the context of this relationship. It simmers just below — always just below. I only pretend that my pain goes away, or that I have finally solved or dissolved it. In this relationship, my armor thins. I become vulnerable. Pain leaks out; pain floods awareness and overwhelms. Any break in the relationship triggers old stuff; the thin skin that covers old injuries rips open, exposes other, older, even deeper injuries.

 A new intimate relationship stirs up old feelings. Who knows where new pain starts and old pain ends? Sometimes old pain simply obscures and confuses. Our relationship wants to go one way, gets sidetracked, twists into patterns made long ago to avoid or re-enact old pain. Confusion descends, veers into distrust. Expectation sours, in a heartbeat, from hope to despair. Communication deteriorates into static, and static threatens to escalate, to obliterate. So while this essay is about me and my process, its context feels inextricably interpersonal.

 “What? How could this be?” Mind instantly realizes its impotence in the face of Vince’s implacable resistance. Recognition cracks mind’s façade. Suddenly, in the deep and dark of this night, very soon after mind’s sudden flight from body to fixate on what went wrong, by the grace of the Goddess a larger part of me wakes up and, in a eureka moment, notices — Small Mind has gone berserk.

 So my process now includes two separates awarenesses. First, the usual small, chattering — and sometimes berserk — Small Mind. Second, an awareness more spacious and non-judgmental — what I call Fair Witness. Fair Witness functions as an impartial ally that views both my behavior and my internal process as if from above, clearly and with equanimity. Indeed, Fair Witness calms me; without Fair Witness, Small Mind would have ruined my life decades ago, spiraling down into chronic pain, to depression, hopelessness, despair.

 Seconds after Small Mind’s escape from my body, thanks to the objective observation of Fair Witness, Small Mind drops back into body, where it clings like a burr to black hole’s ceaseless swirling down into nothingness-at-the-core, the death-in-life that the small “I” wants to do anything, anything, to avoid, to get away from, to deny. But it cannot. Committed now — and despite its terror and revulsion — Small Mind plunges deep and relinquishes control. Why the shift? Because suddenly Small Mind finds itself welcomed into the arms of yet another awareness, another “I.”

 Here, then, a third awareness, distinguished from the other two awarenesses (Small Mind, Fair Witness). I call this awareness Higher Self, and in its presence, Small Mind gives way. Higher Self encompasses my entire being; Higher Self includes Fair Witness and Small Mind, as well as my pain and my body. Higher Self serves as compass and guide to my life’s direction. Each time I experience crippling pain, Higher Self reminds me to “move awareness into the pain, into the very center of the pain, and remain there no matter how much it hurts, or how long it takes, until the pain moves.” Higher Self knows — the only way out is through.

 To move through, I must center my small-minded, egoic awareness deep inside that chaotic-feeling black hole of abandonment and desolation and, while there, become one with my breath and its cyclical fill and release. Like lapping waves that pulverize rocks into sand, sooner or later my breath gradually permeates the dense, leaden black hole — and usually much later. I struggle to stay with the process no matter how long it takes — this subtle, ever so gentle rhythm of the breath surrounds and then calms; it rocks in and out, in and out, encouraging Small Mind not to fly out of body and lets body gradually relax pain’s relentless grip.

 The swell and subsidence of my breath, if long and slow and balanced, lightens the swirling black hole inside me. When I hold my breath, or when my breath runs shallow and short, then the situation worsens and sometimes panic sets in. But when I have the courage, and the faith, and the trust, to settle into the breath, then it gradually returns to its natural rhythm. As the breath gradually lengthens, the internal storm gradually clears.

So I breathe. I breathe into the pain. No matter how long it takes, I keep breathing. No matter how many times Small Mind flies off into obsessive analysis, I attempt to patiently breathe my mind back down into hell. To be here, right here, right now, no matter how claustrophobic, or how awful. Breathe. Breathe again. And again.

 From Me to We

 It may seem that pain occupies too much of my existence. Why not ignore, avoid, or numb myself, pretend it isn’t there? Should I? Should we? Can you sense a huge horrible, heavy hold in the very center of your being? We reach in and think we find nothing there. We encounter something empty, like a vacuum, no “there” there. (It is no wonder so many of us fear dying. For if the body decays, and nothing survives it, then death seems indeed the end.)

 The nothing that is something at the core of our existence — the awful emptiness, the thing that seems not there — is ubiquitous in the western world, and comes with a long cultural history. In the 19th century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant identified “it” as the ding-an-sich, or “thing-in-itself.” Kant claimed that the ding-an-sich is Reality itself, but that we lack awareness of Reality, because we cannot know it directly. (Then how did he know that he cannot know? — I ask.) Instead, Kant said we view Reality through an inborn perceptual framework that conceals Reality’s true nature.

 From Outside to Inside

 In Kant’s view, we never know reality itself, but only what it appears to be. What if, instead, we invert Kant’s ding-an-sich, the Reality that we cannot know, and turn it inward? What if we explore how our cultural framework constructs and constricts our view of our own inner sanctum and encourages us not to seek ourselves there, if at all?

Kant states that we can never know Reality because our inborn framework blinds and separates us from it. I say that in order to understand reality “out there” we need to first understand ourselves “in here,” both as individuals and as a society. We need to plumb that something deep inside us that is crying out for our attention. For unless and until we do explore our true nature, we feel it as a hideous, empty black hole at our very core that we try like hell to avoid.

 Kant discovered the internal structure of the western mind. He described the underpinnings of our cultural strategy to cope with the daily fears and tremors of modern life while ignoring or denying our inner life. But such systematic denial of Self gradually closes us down. The child’s natural wonder glazes over as the perceptual apparatus of the culture takes over and locks in. Sooner or later, the relentless focus on appearances means that we lose our souls, get stripped of hope, until only the persona remains. When we live from the outside in, the personality may appear to thrive, but the inside withers. This is a huge loss.

Inner and Outer are One

 I join Thoreau, Emerson, Rousseau and others who claim that we can tune into and stay in touch with Reality, with our True Nature, a fundamental sense of self that has been crusted over, due to cultural conditioning. As we recover our True Nature, we also open to the natural world around us. The inside and the outside are not separate, but connected, and function as mirrors. Ultimately, inner and outer are one, a continuum: to explore one’s inner awareness is to center within the heart of Being.

 I speak from experience. For in meditating upon the symbols that imbue events with meaning, I have noticed that the veils covering my own original nature are gradually thinning. My sense of my own evolution as a slow, natural attunement to Oneness comes from close attention to my own unfolding process over the past three decades. And, it stems from my skill and passion as a Ph.D. philosopher turned astrologer who connects what happens in the heavens with events and periods in my life, as well as in others’ lives.

 Yet We Act as if Stuff Matters

 “But what,” you might ask, “does all this have to do with me, my life?” To this, I respond that our tendency to narrow our focus to daily affairs has blinded us to infinity. Like busy little bees, we scurry about with heads down, spending our lives . . . doing what? Moving stuff around! Each of us counts off the minutes by getting, guarding, fixing, destroying, creating more and more stuff! As if stuff is all that matters. As if stuff matters at all.

 Ever since our cultural entrancement with the human capacity to create stuff with stuff, transformed now into an accelerating proliferation of endlessly new technology, we seem to have lost the daily, lived sense that we are all in this life together. Worse, we seem to have lost our capacity for wonder — at the extraordinary fact of Life on Earth and the primal power of creation endlessly spiralling into and out of form. And we have lost the larger view of Life on and within our home planet in relation to our solar system neighbors, of Life from the point of view of our Sun spiraling through this Milky Way galaxy — of Infinite, ever expanding Life beyond.

 Billions of bright stars wink at us every night, as if to let us in on a giant cosmic joke, and we, in our advanced, entranced state of chronic distraction with stuff, refuse to look up!

 That is, we turn away from the stars. The word “disaster” comes from the Greek words dis (away) and aster (star), to turn away from the stars. I am not the first to say that we ignore the larger order to our peril. When we blind ourselves to all but small myopic concerns then the width and depth of these concerns exactly fits within the small ego mind and we lose track of our destiny. The starry night sky above reflects hidden treasure down below. I am a star. You are a star. Each of us is a star in our own right, unique and irreplaceable, designed to shine.

Denial and its Consequences

 Our denial of the larger reality pulsing in through our own body and feelings — and of course, if we deny our feelings, pain will break through first — has been so much a part of our western cultural conditioning that to (pretend to) not feel actually seems “natural.” But denial doesn’t work forever. Sooner or later pain overtakes us, often in some form of chronic disease. From that time on, we have no choice: pain becomes our partner in a slow agonizing dance towards either death, or, rarely, transformed life.

 And of course, our lives in these bodies — this “stuff”– no matter how long, eventually do end. Must the contemplation of our own death be painful? Western culture thinks so — hence the often Herculean efforts to prolong life for even the very, very old and  to avoid  thoughts of self and death. In our culture, “disease,” dis-ease — that condition of being ill-at-ease and not recognizing that our physical and/or mental symptoms mirror and stem from our spiritual distress — has gone on so long that dis-ease descends from the spirit into the mind, and then, ultimately, the body.

 We regard bodily illness as something to fix, a problem to solve. Illness is the enemy, something that attacks us from the outside (viral or bacterial) or inside (like defective DNA or a chemical imbalance), in any case, something separate from our real selves. Small Mind grapples with disease, fights it, does battle with it, and wins — or loses.

 We could work with our chronic individual and cultural ill-at-ease in an entirely other, non-violent way. In this alternative approach to dis-ease, we begin with an acknowledgement of the body’s condition as a reflection of the condition of our larger being — and when I say “larger being,” I refer not just to our small personal lives, but to the state of creation presently on Earth. Each of our bodies is a tiny Earth antenna.

 And each of us, when feeling ill-at-ease or dis-eased, if we attune mind and spirit to feelings with our body, if we dare to surrender to the pain that lies deep within, then we have the opportunity to allow this pain to surface and release.

 No end to Earth’s Pain

 We all wish for an end to suffering. However, I must tell you that in decades of experience with my own hidden, inner pain, I always encounter more; always more pain seeks to surface. At this point, I do sense that my pain belongs not just to me, but to us; that it is ours, our pain, Earth’s pain. For as I surrender to my most vulnerable feelings, the walls that divide me from others and from the natural world thin and dissolve. Indeed, if everyone’s personal pain is an aspect of a single phenomenon, then what makes us curl up in despair, is shared. Our Oneness as a species we know first in our agony.

 I have but one need, to enter the inner space and resonance of a roomful of monks, chanting. I have but one prayer, to slow down for the whisperings of sacred, inner reality inside this fast-track, centrigugal world. I have but one directive, no matter how many times or how often Small Mind flies off, that I spiral back in to full, expanding awareness of the present moment. In this painful birthing into a larger universe, I step into the hush, the hum, the blessing — of a mysterious living presence. My center is Ours, and it is not empty, but full — spacious, expanding, and alive.



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Posted in Current Essays | April 1st, 2010 by Ann

An astonishing synchronicity occurred today as I was checking out the condition of the pond in the GANG garden. This synchronicity felt even more mysterious than usual in that it connects widely disparate events in both space and time . . . To begin:

I had just returned from a walk in the woods with my dog Emma when a car pulled up in my driveway over the fence from the pond. Ah, yes! my friend Dave had told me he wanted to come by to get a couple of grape starts on Thursday morning and I had forgotten. Note that this is where the synchronicity starts, because divine choreography made sure that I’d be back in time for him to arrive.

He had said he’d come by with his sister Linda, from Seattle, visiting Bloomington for the first time after 35 years! As she got out of the car she exclaimed how much my dog looks like her neighbor’s dog, named “Sparky.”

“Sparky?” I asked? “My sister has a dog just like this one and his name is ‘Sparky,’ and Oh! She also lives in Seattle!”

“Lives in Seattle? What’s her name?” The way she said this, felt insistent.

I tried to downplay it. “There are millions of people in Seattle.”

But she wouldn’t let  go. ”Tell me, what’s her name?”

“Cowan. Mary Cowan.”

“Cowan! And her husband is named John? That’s my next door neighbor!”

So that’s the synchronicity in space, from three people in the GANG garden in Bloomington to two houses next to each other in Seattle. Now for the really wild part that connects these events in time as well and seems to point in a very particular direction . . .

This same brother-in-law John Cowan and I had been talking for several years about our Urban Farmstead here, the fact that our three houses and contiguous properties have all joined to share the use of the land for growing food, meanwhile getting together for potlucks and exchanging services, tools, skills, knowledge, etc. John had been wanting to do the same thing in his little corner of Seattle, but as we all know, it’s very difficult to “get to know your neighbors” after several generations of trying to ignore them in favor of “doing your own thing” and “making it on your own,” and “being self-sufficient” and thinking of neighbors as “nosy.” We’re all so weirdly afraid!

So, there I was, standing in the GANG garden on our Urban Farmstead, visiting with my local friend Dave and his sister Linda who has come for the first time in 35 years and who happens to live next door to the Cowans who have been so wanting to get to know their neighbors and start the same or similar kind of connection where they live . . .

Linda and I then talked about how all they they would need to do is put a gate in the fence that separates them.

The universe is conspiring to get us to create openings, more and more of them, and all of them local. Forget corporate and governmental and military domination. Just connect! Right here and right now, with the people next door — and their dogs!



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Posted in Current Essays | April 1st, 2010 by Ann

SHAPED BY THE WINDS OF CHANGE

© Ann Kreilkamp 2009

[This essay was published in the second edition of Crone Magazine: Women Coming of Age, September, 2009]

I have just returned from taking niece Megan to the airport, and anticipate falling back into the lap of solitude. But when I unlock the door and walk through the rooms, rather than silent and serene, they feel empty, hollow, abandoned!

Wow! I begin to pay close attention to my emotional state. Exhaustion. A sinking feeling. Sadness. Huh? Sadness? Yes, sadness, and, let’s name it precisely: desolation. Yes, I admit: Megan’s yearly visits have started to feel regenerative. They lighten the mood and quicken my responses. Indeed, my intuitively gifted, but whiny and self-absorbed spiritual daughter has now, at thirty-four, morphed into my teacher. In the twelve years since we first bonded, she has, with resolute intent, trained and integrated a number of modalities into a multidimensional healing practice. During this visit, besides gifting me with massage and homemade tinctures and salves, Megan introduced me to her latest offering: the “medicinal kitchen,” where food is medicine.

I miss the fragrances emanating from her bubbling pots. I miss our conversations. I miss sharing mind and heart. Calling each other on our bullshit. Laughing like crazy. Discussing the intricacies of karma, the stages of love and grief, the subtleties of awareness.

On impulse, I call to tell her that I feel desolate and that this feeling has caught me by surprise. She says she misses me too. I ask her if she would not only consider moving to Bloomington (something we had been discussing), but would she also consider the idea of living with me in my home. If I am surprised to say it, she is dumbfounded to hear it. Her prickly auntie’s famous, even furious need for solitude? breached? — deliberately??! Neither of us can quite believe it.

That was how 2009 began;  Megan is due to arrive, trailing her worldly possessions, in June.

I have long been aware of my tendency to anticipate cultural trends. As one born at the leading edge of the generation that came of age during the ‘60s, I am designed to live at culture’s edge, and see my life as an ongoing experiment.

Ever since we threw away our bras and banded together in “consciousness-raising” groups to dissect male/female power relations, we have pioneered alternatives to the dominant culture. Gravitating to both mystical spiritual traditions and aboriginal practices — Gnostic, Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist, shamanic, Native American and other guides to what is, we honor and embrace ourselves, each other, and all living things. We are willing to expand awareness into the infinite unknown, and recognize all mind maps as but finite traces in the heart’s awe-filled immensity.

For decades now, we have been “doing our thing,” “getting our act together,” and — as if to prove that evolution is not random but intelligent — our self-centered narcissism has mutated into an intent to serve the whole. All those meditation practices, all that yoga and tai chi and other daily disciplines have transformed our center of gravity: from ego to essence, from personality to soul, from mine to ours. We are tapping into the shared, fluidic, all-encompassing Love that upholds and fuels the universe.

Now crossing the cusp into so-called “retirement,” we “old hippies” recognize that once again, our time has come. That lifelong experimental attitude that blew us outside the culture, coupled with the ancient, non-consumptive, life-serving values that we adopted can and will serve as a refuge from chaos and a template for coherence. Increasingly, we are demonstrating alternative possibilities for living in an energetic field that allows for full aliveness, fertilizing the seeds of a transformed culture during the inexorable energy descent that soon begins to force drastic changes.

For the past year especially, I have noticed myself surrounded by young people seeking guidance. As I feel called into service during this period of darkness that precedes the transfiguration of society, so do these young ones, and they seek elders to mentor them. And who more appropriate than battle-scarred, still-idealistic warriors deeply familiar with both cultural shock and psychedelic voyages into other dimensions? We have lived as outsiders in a world gone mad. Survivors of intensely experimental group dynamics, our prescriptions to recover the missing commons, common sense, and common-sensing are based on what the young ones intuitively gravitate towards: simplicity, naturalness, organic food, small group sharing, community living, communion with nature, and oneness with the divine. Born with their DNA coded to what we so painstakingly, and with great risk and reward, had to forge, they gift us with the energy of youth as we work together to transform the world.

Who we are and our stories from “long ago” once again ring true — indeed, more and more true as the great bloated belly of America awakens from its television trance and its frenetic get-ahead desperation to begin “the great turning.” Right thought, right actions, right relations, right livelihood: these will increase the probability of human survival in this terrifying, exhilarating, climactic era of financial, corporate and infrastructure meltdown. The ongoing loss of jobs, homes, and competitive, consumptive habits are all set amidst the specters of climate change, overpopulation, runaway contamination, and Earth’s rapidly depleting resource base.

Many in my generation sold out big-time. Dreamy flower-children in youth, they switched gears and bought into the dog-eat-dog capitalism that narrows imaginations to the American Dream. And when the mortgaged McMansion on an acre of chemicalized grass is not enough, and it’s never enough, then stuff, stuff, and more stuff — all bought on credit! Anything to make a mark, to show who’s boss, to stand on top in a boring, tiresome reiteration of the dramatic, colorful “do my thing” narcissism that fueled our original generational break from society and then, unfortunately, got stuck in perpetual adolescence.

Luckily, a sizeable contingent of ‘60s pioneers still incubate the larger vision of a shared, harmonious world. We are the foolish ones. With stars in our eyes and a song in our hearts, we were genetically coded to experiment with alternatives. Though we did, at times, go astray. Or seemed to. Actually, I would say now that we were experimenting, as usual. We straddled the extremes, traced ever-larger horizons, groped blindly through hurricane emotional forces to finally — thanks to longstanding meditative practices — rest in the eye of the storm where we gaze, calmly and with detachment, on desire as the root of suffering.

Looking back, it feels miraculous that we actually managed to soldier through to tell the tale. Each of us has our own story, and mine is typically strange.

In the early ‘70s I lived in Massachusetts and California communes, all of them more or less “back to the land and simple living” and all what we later learned to call “dysfunctional” —full of sex, drugs, rock and roll, “control trips,” encounter groups to confront the control trips, and a terrifying visionary idealism that, we discovered, could easily trip into righteousness, paranoia, delusion, and even violence.

For me, communal living recreated my early childhood as the first of eight children — but with a difference. Then my father was boss. Now we wouldn’t let anyone be boss and since we didn’t know how to do what we knew was important to do — work and act together as one — “mere anarchy was loosed upon the land.”

During the ‘80s many of us turned inward, to lick our wounds and seek the source of projections that had fueled those intense interpersonal dramas. We started to take seriously our motto that “we create our reality,” and sought to identify, recognize, feel fully, forgive, and release the original dynamics of our family patterns — or even further, into past lives.

For some, this investigation required solitude. In the late ‘80s and ‘90s I lived in Wyoming, in a twenty-foot diameter yurt as close to the Mother as the young moose whose snoring startled me awake all winter long. I never felt more at peace as when winds hurled snow or rain or sleet across the yurt’s thin skin while warm and safe in the company of a licking, crackling fire. The simplicity of yurt living grounded my deepest values.

I probably spent fully one-third of each day in my forties exploring my inner life with the aim to transform the psychological patterns in me that had caused suffering.

Just when I realized that this process was winding down, that I could do no more inner work on my own, I met Jeff, my partner for twelve years until his death in early 2003. During the nearly seven years since, I have once again relished solitude. Unlike most widows, who must pick themselves up, pretend to “have gotten over it,” and “go back to work,” I was fortunate; Jeff’s pension cushioned shock, and gave me the means to continue living in the house we had bought just before he died in the new town to which we had just moved. I knew I had been gifted with a rare opportunity — to grieve, as fully and deeply as necessary, through whatever forms grief might take.

I’ve enjoyed luxuriating in my own home within walking distance of concerts, plays, downtown restaurants, a nearly year-long Saturday Farmer’s Market, in community-oriented, Midwestern university town. Blessed with a deep sense of feeling “at home” for the very first time in a mostly gypsy life, I live exactly as I please, with no one looking over my shoulder or needing my cooperation.

Then, just when I got used to the idea that maybe I actually deserved to live by myself in a thirteen-hundred-square-foot home, the zeitgeist started to blow from a new direction.

I had already cut way down on jet travel, realizing its wasteful energy footprint. I had replaced light bulbs decades ago, signed up on Freecycle and returned to my old practice of shopping in thrift stores. But now I started to acknowledge the wasteful energy footprint of living alone.

Finally, during my Winter Solstice three-day meditation, I received these whispered words: Now is the time of gathering. You must orchestrate an entirely new way of living.

I tried not to take this message seriously, or think through what it might mean until my desolation after Megan’s departure nudged me further.

Hopefully, the years of solitude have helped me to integrate the various warring parts of myself into a living, dynamic whole so that I no longer project my unconscious “stuff” onto others without almost immediately recognizing it. Hopefully, while centered in my own integrity, my presence will catalyze healing in any dysfunctional drama that threatens to replay as I begin to interact at close range on a daily basis, once again with others.

Six months ago I cashed in ever-dwindling IRAs to buy the house next door, and will soon rent it at a reduced rate to students of permaculture. Meanwhile I am sponsoring a series of nearly-free workshops to turn its sunny, large lawn into a permaculture garden for the neighborhood. By August, four young permaculturists (and two small children) will be living in the house behind these two, and we plan to forge a common design for the three properties as a demonstration Urban Farmstead. Our farmstead is nestled within the Green Acres Neighborhood which, for the past six years, I and others have been actively working to transform into a sustainable village.

Variants of this scenario are springing up all over America as a new template for living lightly on the land inside our hometowns in a survival/thrival scenario that emphasizes food security, shared resources, community self-sufficiency and the regenerative resilience of full aliveness. What is now called “Transition” is a movement spreading from the U.K. through Australia and New Zealand to the U.S.A.

• For my Urban Farmstead blog:

www.tendrepress.com/?cat=6

• For more on our Green Acres Neighborhood Association:

www.bloomington.in.us/~gana/

• For the Green Acres Neighborhood Plan and my Introduction to it: www.bloomington.in.gov/media/media/application/pdf/52.pdf

• For more on permaculture:

www.permacultureactivist.net

• for sharing the bounty:

www.freecycle.com

• for your energy footpring:

www.whatismyfootprint.com

_____________

Ann Kreilkamp, Ph.D. 66, is Editor of this magazine, author of This Vast Being: A Voyage through Grief and Exaltation, a student of astrology since 1973, a community activist, and a budding permaculturist. See also her website www.tendrepress.com or her regular Croning column in SageWoman magazine (www.sagewoman.com).



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Posted in Crone Magazine, Current Essays | March 12th, 2010 by admin

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Note: A version of this essay was published in the first issue of the periodical Crone: Women Coming of Age (www.cronemagazinecom), of which Ann is the Editor. Crone: Women Coming of Age is the successor magazine to Crone Chronicles: A Journal of Conscious Aging, which Ann founded and ran from 1989-2001.

REFLECTIONS ON “CRONE”

© 2007 by Ann Kreilkamp

I offer these reflections on “crone” as a challenge to members of the baby-boomer generation, now beginning to pass through the gate of sixty. For, though all decade markers feel significant, this one does seem like a particularly crucial crossroads. We may still feel young, but we can no longer, if we are honest, claim to be young.

It appears that we each have a clear choice of two very different paths to follow as we advance into old age. I call these paths “getting old” and “growing old.” The first is the default choice, and leads to unnecessary suffering. The other path, “growing old,” believe it or not, leads to unexpected serenity, even joy. Moreover, it appears that a single, simple criterion distinguishes the two, and this is a deliberately inculcated awareness of the multidimensional process of aging.

What follows is an explication of the two paths, and their respective fruits.

As the third millennium dawns, the word “crone” gradually re-enters the vernacular, its meaning transformed from the dictionary’s “ugly, withered, witchlike old woman.” Crone has been resurrected: as an honorific title bestowed or claimed in “croning ceremonies” by women of a certain age; as a newly re-activated archetype of the collective unconscious; as the third aspect, or phase, of the ancient Triple Goddess, Maiden-Mother-Crone. Many elder women refer to themselves as “crone,” both to signal a connection with others who call themselves crone and to acknowledge their own inner value.

Yet no matter how “enlightened” we think ourselves, the transition between the second and third stages of a woman’s life does feel momentous. Most of us confront a seemingly instinctive reluctance to embrace our own aging process. I am reminded of a local woman who paints portraits of young and old women, but not middle-aged women. Why not middle-aged women? “Because,” she says, “they do not like what their portraits show them.”

We should not be surprised at our reluctance. As members of a throw-away culture that recoils from aging, old age, and death, it feels natural to shy away from any reminder of wrinkled skin, sagging bodies and forgetful minds. We all have a fundamental need to belong. None of us wants to lose value over time.

To embrace Crone is to become the Fool in the world’s eyes. We dare to step into a life that no longer takes its cues from the outside world. Indeed, one definition for Crone is “She who lives from the inside out.”

Our capacity to embrace Crone emerges naturally from our willingness, throughout our lives, to live in harmony with the laws of nature, both inner and outer. Experience teaches us that all of life moves in cycles, and that in any cycle we sense the life force press forward to begin, then settle into fullness, and then, when the time is ripe, to gradually — or suddenly — let go.

Early on we learned to flow with day and night, summer and winter. In our teens we surrendered to the wax and wane of the blood’s lunar flow. Over and over again, our social world gifted us with and then yanked away friends, lovers, children, money, honors, things, careers. At about the half-century mark even the Mother’s menstrual cycle ceased, ushering us into the final, letting go, stage of life.

Just as the carefree innocence of Maiden gave way to full immersion into family, social and career responsibilities of Motherhood, so too Motherhood gives way, if we are fortunate, to some measure of solitude and its fruits: the detachment, wisdom, and compassion of Crone.

We who, moment by moment, embrace death in order to more fully live, know that each succeeding cycle or phase of a cycle is or can be experienced as subtler, more complex, and thus more interesting, than the one from which it emerged. Each phase requires that the prior phase die and be absorbed into a larger reality. So while the gap between Mother and Crone may feel enormous, so did the gap between Maiden and Mother. Inexorable hormonal and biological shifts herald both transformations; they accompany or cause changes in appearance, psychology, values, perception of and manner of interacting with the world.

Both Maiden and Mother have socially recognized value. It felt natural to recognize the gap between the first two stages and, unless we were “tomboys,” embrace the shift from one to the other. In contrast, given our cultural conditioning, we tend to resist the shift between Mother and Crone. And since we are the first generation in recorded history to look forward to life spans long enough for the Crone stage of life to be significant, it is difficult to honor or even recognize the contours and content of what we are heading into.

Indeed, our transition into Crone appears first as Mystery, a great unknown. Insofar as we have identified with our bodily form — and our scientific, materialistic culture suggests –urges, almost insists that we do this — we will want to hold on to this life forever. Yet we cannot. Crone is the stage where form ultimately yields to the spirit — and there’s no holding it back. Like the phoenix from its ashes, spirit rises. Sooner or later, gradually or suddenly, we all incandesce.

Indeed, another definition of Crone might be “she who transforms matter into spirit.”

Let us grab hold of this unparalleled opportunity to both acknowledge and celebrate our destiny as pioneers, the first generations in thousands of years who may live long enough to consciously map this archetypal wilderness.

And yet we cannot pretend that we are inventing something new. For if Crone is an aspect of the ancient Triple Goddess, then her place in the pantheon was secure and her divine realm reflected in terrestrial affairs. And, as an archetype, the attitudes, values and possibilities of Crone have nestled in latent form within the human psyche forever. What we are inventing is a way of understanding, enhancing and productively working with our experience of the aging process in a contemporary context.

Few models exist, so few that sometimes we wonder if we’re just pretending, making it all up! Yet certain truths do seem self-evident. For example, we recognize intuitively that not all women become “crones.” Some do, but most don’t. But why do we say this? What is our criterion for “crone”? How do we distinguish between those who do and don’t? What is crone?

One might say that we wish to describe the difference between those who “age gracefully” and those who don’t. But should we even use this hackneyed phrase? For though “grace” is something that I, for one — being awkward and easily aroused — aspire to, the phrase itself does not explicitly honor the power inherent in we who aim to live from the inside out and who may — at times, and with good reason! — choose to ignore cultural forms of politeness. That’s why we use the so-called “ugly” word “crone.” Crone is taboo, it carries a charge. Crone signifies at the very least an unpredictable woman, one who is no longer bound by convention, who endures a larger perspective, and cannot, nay, will not be silenced.

I am often asked, at what age does a woman become crone? Many markers have been suggested. When her blood flow ceases, for example. Or at one of her decade birthdays, the 50th, or the 60th. When her children leave home. When she retires from the workplace, or gets divorced. When her husband or partner dies. When she “loses her looks.”

In my view, as Louis Armstrong is reported to have said when asked about jazz: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” Well, maybe not never. But it might take a few more years, a few more knocks, a bit more practice at letting-go before any particular woman can say, without reservation, that she is crone.

And for some women, of course — both those who recognize intuitively that they’ve been working with crone energy for years, even decades, and those who quiver with rage or terror at the very mention of the word — the question does not even come up. Such women hold the extremes.

Most of us occupy a vague and wavering middle ground. Crone steals in softly over the years, heralded by little clues — we have trouble getting the waiter’s attention at a restaurant; our face falls and our memory stalls; our hands morph into our mother’s hands; we go to bed early, can’t sleep through the night, and no longer spring up upon awakening …

Reverberations deepen. We realize that we have fewer years to live than we have already lived; every decision feels momentous, and we refuse to waste any more time. We wonder how we will be remembered, and how we want to remember others. We actually consider the idea of long-term care insurance. Memories from long ago steal in, fill our nostrils, our skin, confuse and enliven each moment. Horizons broaden, deepen, to include more, more, ever more …

We all have experiences like these. Yet how many of us embrace them, see them for what they are, heralds of a primary shift in focus, the spirit’s longing, an altered life?

In any case, though for some the crone stage arrives as an inner state or condition of awareness early, some late, for some gradually, others suddenly, and for still others not at all, the archetype must be consciously activated in order to be fully and authentically experienced.

But what does it mean to “activate the archetype”? The original question remains: just what, really, is crone?

For me, the essence of crone is that she “eats her own shadow.” As she ages, she continues to unfold the complexity and vastness of her original nature by facing, embracing, and then consciously incorporating unknown aspects of herself as they rise from the depths to the light of conscious awareness. In this process she evolves, or individuates, grows towards wholeness.

These unknown aspects appear at first by projection: we recognize them in the face or manner of someone to whom we are greatly attracted — or repelled; we identify them as characters in novels, or movies; they appear as dream figures, or in a painting; as an odd song we suddenly begin to hum; as enigmatic words that shock, written by our own hand. Subtly, gradually, the realization dawns: all we perceive as apart from us is in reality a part of us.

Sometimes our discoveries delight us, when qualities, skills, talents, long forgotten or ignored, emerge; just as often what surfaces from the unconscious makes us cringe. We blush to recognize the machinations of ego, those little pockets of mental justification that mask a stubborn, wounded pride, a refusal to embrace the Other as ourself.

In any case, no matter what “comes up,” the woman who aspires to full cronehood accepts and works to integrate any so-called foreign matter that her inner world reveals. And throughout this process, she knows that there is only one requirement: awareness.

Yet this requirement seems so simple, so elemental, as to be either obvious or absurd. When she tells others about her focus on “awareness” some look at her blankly. They stare — and look away. She shrugs. That’s okay. Sooner or later they too will encounter an insistent urge to know themselves, their own inner sanctum. Sooner or later, if we are lucky, we all will, and our cultural life will be immeasurably enriched.

In order to “eat her shadow,” the would-be crone endeavors to remain as conscious as she possibly can of whatever she is going through moment by moment by moment.

Of course this is impossible. What the meditator calls “monkey mind” always interferes. When we pay attention to the workings of this mind of ours, we discover that it cannot help but think, continuously drumming up images, nudges, admonitions, regrets, hopes — it hardly matters what about! Pay close attention, and we notice that as soon as an idea pops up, we become internally agitated. Ideas, it appears, are always accompanied by desire, whether subtle or blatant. In wanting to do something, or get something, or get rid of or avoid something or someone, we sense our muscles tense, coil for action.

Since we have lived for many decades, we have entertained lots of ideas — way too many to count! We have also begun to notice that ideas are linked to expectations, and that expectations either come true or they don’t.

When they do, we puff up; when they don’t, we crash. First up, then down, like yo-yos jerked by an invisible hand, we have dealt with the see-saw of triumph and disappointment so many times that eventually, if we are aware — if we can begin to catch ourselves in the act of thinking a certain (usually secret, shameful, worrisome and obsessive) thought — then we can also learn to interrupt the predictable patterns that thought triggers us to act out, dramas that frankly, have lost their luster and begun to “get old.”

In my observation, most people themselves, over time, just “get old.” They become predictable, rigid, stuck; locked into repeating idiosyncratic mental and emotional patterns, they ossify, petrify, crystallize out. Some few, rare ones however, instead “grow old.” I would like to reserve the honorific title “crone” for the decidedly alive female members of this latter group. For even as their bodies lose energy, their spirits eagerly adapt to and digest any experience, no matter how wild or forbidding.

Without awareness, the first road, “getting older,” is easy, indeed inevitable. It’s the default mode. Gravity sets in, pulls us inexorably downward. Bodies decay at a more or less predictable rate. No matter how we kick and scream, no matter how much we deny or disguise or manage to temporarily delay or even reverse (we hope) the aging process, the road ahead does lead inexorably down, and we end up bitter, defeated, resentful or resigned. In this scenario, no matter how long our life, it feels nasty, brutish and short. Shit happens, and then you die.

The alternative, “growing older,” on the other hand, is difficult, because it requires a great effort — not to do something, but to let go of our identification with changing surface conditions. Instead, we witness whatever we do, think, and feel. In other words, we aim to shift our awareness from what we are doing, thinking, feeling, to the realm underneath and independent of the “ten thousand things” that entrain our attention and keep us riled up.

As we begin to practice awareness, training ourselves to wake up over and over again in the present moment, we unexpectedly discover that we also begin to enter into a different relationship with our own aging process.

Though we still find ourselves in resistance to gravity’s downward pull, we notice our resistance as natural, and accept ourselves in moments of resistance, too. That’s okay. It’s all okay. In the midst of witnessing our resistance we paradoxically begin to accept this and other facets of aging as inevitable while simultaneously aiming to increase our sensitivity not just to changes in the physical realm, but to changes in emotional, mental and spiritual realms as well. Furthermore, in our awareness of the various dimensions of aging, we aim to support and nourish the entire process, and share its fruits with others.

Unlike the one-dimensional linear awareness of past and future that our culture encourages us to experience, our practice of immersing ourselves in an accepting awareness of the present moment begins to spread, to the point where it includes paradox, a bi-valent awareness and appreciation of opposites as equally real. In one stroke we break through the “logic” of systemic cultural fundamentalism, for which only one side of any “contradiction” can be “true.” For, as awareness widens, we begin to realize that it’s all true, all of it! Which means that there is nothing to judge, no one to blame. Yes/no, either/or, black/white, off/on dissolve into this, just this: our recognition that opposites merely pose as enemies in the drama of the whole.

Gradually our conscious awareness and embrace of paradox diversifies into a multi-faceted, multidimensional comprehension that expands into the vastness and has no discernable limits. Thus, while our bodies slide down hill, our spirits, on the other hand, begin to soar — a prime paradox of the aging process!

Another paradox; for we both acknowledge the aging process and work to slow or temporarily reverse its effects. Thus, though we aim to be consciously aware of the body’s downhill slide towards oblivion, we also nourish it with exercise and food so that it may remain lubricated and flexible for as long as possible.

We view our stewardship of our own bodies as fundamental. For unless we work to keep our bodies in relatively prime condition, we may become so distracted by pain and disability that our awareness of larger dimensions cannot fully flower. And without this flowering, we may neither appreciate the fullness of our own lives nor be able to participate in and, as elders, serve as mentors in the life of the larger culture.

Another paradox thus presents itself: for while it may appear that we are being selfish by focusing into our own bodies, we do so not only for own sake, but for the sake of others. Our aim is twofold: to both share the specific fruits that we have gained through our process of conscious aging, and to prevent becoming parasitic on society in our final years.

Given that the rate of decay of the body seems to increase the longer we live, the differential between being aware of what’s going on internally and not being aware continually widens, and the longer we wait to “wake up” to the reality of our situation as aging persons, the more painful it may be to allow in this awareness. So it behooves us to wake up sooner rather than later!

But in order to do so, we must break through our lifelong cultural conditioning. This is no small feat! We were encouraged from the time we were small children to “be brave,” to “put on a happy face,” to “not cry” — in short not to experience the very real feelings that are centered in our bodily awareness.

And yet here, another paradox comes to our aid: for the older we get, the more our culture ignores us, wants to get rid of us, and thus the less we have to lose by breaking through into a different way of experiencing reality. Outcasts already, we consciously choose to cast ourselves outside the cultural mold and begin to focus inward, through awareness, on the constantly changing situation within our own bodies.

And still another paradox: For though we deliberately narrow our focus to what is going on in the body, this focus actually alerts us not only to our physical, but to our emotional, mental and spiritual condition in any given moment as well! By narrowing, we widen. By focusing, we expand.

Say, for example, that our digestion isn’t working well. Rather than trying to ignore it, or “take something for it” to mask the condition, we pay attention to it. We focus in on the discomfort in our abdomen and just sit there with it, at one with it. As we do this, we will at some point notice that not only do we not feel well physically, we also feel out of sorts emotionally, mentally, and even spiritually.

I notice this every time I “go home” to visit my original family. When in each other’s presence, we all start farting! There is simply way too much unprocessed stuff from the past flying around for us not to feel it in our guts.

When I pay close attention to my own experience, I notice that certain ideas in my mind and heart run parallel to my gassy, bloated, lethargic state. I “can’t digest” this or that parent or sibling attitude, so I judge internally and feel weird in their presence, fake; yet I don’t say what I really think and feel: it wouldn’t be “polite,” and would “upset” everyone. Through long conditioning, I’ve learned to prefer my “upset stomach” to any rupture in that social order.

Waking up to this kind of inner/outer awareness in the middle of daily life is not easy. At first we can only capture our attention and focus it momentarily. And it’s hard enough to do this alone, given the tendency of the mind to rush in with its incessant busyness. Add to this mix other people, especially those we grew up with, and the effort to focus deeply into our own interior state in the maelstrom of that social scene feels near impossible. Why? Why is it so damned hard?

Well, that certainly is where our attention goes, from infancy on — to the outside. From our first breath we are genetically programmed to get our five outer senses operational and integrated in order interact successfully with the outside world. So, at first, it’s instinctive and necessary for survival.

But then, 21st century American culture takes over, amplifies and speeds up surface interactions with first toys, then more stuff, status, technology and media — distracting us utterly from the mysterious reaches within. Most of us born from the mid-20th century on have not learned to become conscious of our internal life while engaged in external life. Not only because it’s so damned difficult, but also because nobody ever told us that this practice was interesting, much less instructive and possibly redemptive!

Indeed, one might say that the process of becoming crone by practicing awareness of the fullness of the present moment — whatever’s happening on the outside and whatever comes up from the unconscious inside — is the process of deconditioning oneself from the learned lack of awareness one has been taught since birth! — and that includes the culture’s view of the aging process and ourselves as aging persons.


When we are born our original natures are full and present, though unconscious. Anyone who takes the time to “be” with a silent, attentive newborn child can feel the presence of an immense and mysterious capacity. Yet, from that moment on, the process of conditioning into western culture proceeds. Different cultures encourage certain qualities and repress others, and some remain closer, more in touch with nature than others; but in every case, once children reach adulthood they have more or less squeezed or truncated their original natures to fit the contours of the society into which they were born.

Human growth, at any age, is not linear. We don’t just “add” previously unknown characteristics of ourselves to an already familiar repertoire. Rather, each significant learning alters the whole, and this again, is most evident in children, who seem to change on a daily, if not hour-by-hour basis. We marvel at the way children incorporate both the culture’s expectations and their own previously unrecognized talents.

In our materialistic culture, we usually think of growth in physical terms, and assume that whereas children grow, adults do not! Rather than grow, adults accumulate — experience, knowledge, weight, children, stuff, property, money, reputation.

Again, due to our limited, materialistic framework, we endure a limited, negative picture of old age, viewing life’s final act as a time when physical processes reverse; when the body and usually the mind deteriorate over time. In other words, when we lose what we have accumulated.

Thus, in our culture, most people do just “get older,” and resent it, try to stop, disguise, or slow down time, experienced as a straight line that begins in birth and ends in death.

On the other hand, we who experience ourselves as “growing older” sense our lives as a cycle, and old age as a time when we feel the circle of our life looping back. This experience of time as a curving line creates an evolving awareness of the entire space that our life-cycle is to eventually inhabit, and we experience a desire to understand that space, that life-cycle, as a whole. Death, for one growing older, rather than just getting older, is looked forward to as closure, completion, fulfillment — and gateway to renewed life beyond.

As we investigate, through awareness, the space that our life in this body is creating, we find ourselves returning to the feeling of constant discovery that we experienced as a child, for whom the whole world was new! Rather than, like many adults, spending most of our time living-for-or-dreading-the-future and/or living-in-or-regretting-the-past, we begin to sense future and past as establishing an initial 360° horizon of the now. We move from clock time to present time, sensing ourselves at the very center of an enormous space that opens in every direction and melts us into the heart of being.

As we relax into the presence of this mysterious reality that exists below the surface turbulence of mind’s mental gyrations, its obsessive focus on expectations that have or have not been met, long-suppressed qualities and tendencies that were present originally begin to surface into our expanded awareness. Each new incorporation of a previously suppressed, and seemingly alien element within us alters our being, so that, over and over again we surprise ourselves — and others — with the de-light-ful person that we are becoming. Over and over again, like children, we crones change, and are reborn. There is no end to this process. Our lives renew themselves with every breath.

Ideally, and if we are very, very fortunate, once we reach the crone stage of life we don’t have as many responsibilities and can enjoy regular time-outs where we recapitulate the entire space of our lives so far, and catch up to ourselves. In other words, the life-review that usually, if at all, occurs only on one’s death-bed can become a part of our daily practice.

This practice not only serves to further unfold the promise of one’s original nature, but in fact this very personal, interior activity can be of immense public benefit. Younger women hunger for crone wisdom. Children and those who suffer need our unconditionally loving arms and gaze. Corporate boards and public officials need us to compassionately witness their deliberations as they make decisions affecting future generations. As we increase awareness of the mysterious and seemingly unfathomable fullness of our own inner lives, the promise of our original natures becomes freely available. As crones, we present a model of and a perspective on the whole of life for all those with whom we come in contact.

Most people have taken on so many responsibilities that they are way too busy or distracted or desperate to even realize that this kind of inner activity is possible, much less recognize its gifts. The ravenous global capitalistic consumer culture narrows the focus of all but a tiny elite to sheer survival; and we are all schooled into an addictive, competitive grasping for social riches, status and power that keep us in estranged from our original natures. In addition, many people as they get older have lived so long in an unconscious mental state, and/or have for so long ignored or not been able to afford good nutrition and daily exercise, that at this advanced stage in life they become increasingly overwhelmed by exhaustion and eventually, illness and death — experienced then, not as closure, but as failure.

I consider myself extremely fortunate in that I have kept my physical vehicle in relatively prime condition, that I have long been a seeker of expanded awareness, and that I now have the time, energy, resources and drive to engage in this daily practice of self-remembering.

In the process I have discovered that as I plunge into the depths of my own small personal self, as I begin to inhabit the full space of my own personal life-cycle by becoming fully present to this one moment, the trajectory of my life dissolves and I am suddenly or imperceptibly immersed in a reality so vast as to be utterly incomprehensible. Another paradox. Limited personal awareness surrenders, in fits and starts, scared and thrilled, to this vast being, a universal awareness that spans the heavens and obliterates time.

I cannot escape growing intimations of a living presence that breathes through us as a single organism, a unity, the Oneness of which mystics of every culture and every religion speak. And I cannot help but feel that this new, wondrous, still tentative, hesitant, vulnerable sense of feeling utterly at home in a light-drenched harmonic universe is what we all long for. That when we do begin to burrow underneath the thick encrustations of personality, habit, family and cultural conditioning, the physical, emotional, and ideological isolations that separate us — when we do begin to jerk ourselves awake over and over again, no matter how arduous, or how long and painful the journey, that we will finally re-member our origins and find our purpose as elderwomen at the beginning of the 21st century: to serve as healers in a world gone mad.

I, for one, as I accept the mantle of crone, ask that through cultivating an abiding awareness I may evolve into an open channel for the larger presence that silently holds all of creation in Love’s open arms.



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Posted in Astrology, Current Essays | March 12th, 2010 by admin

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© Ann Kreilkamp
New Years Day 2009

On December 21, 2008 we heralded the return of the Sun during what may have felt like the darkest Winter Solstice in memory. For the first time since 1269 A.D., the Sun hit 0°00 Capricorn and joined Pluto, planet of death and regeneration. Sun exactly conjunct Pluto at the Winter Solstice. I can think of no astrological indication more symbolic of the transmutation that now percolates through our world and our deepest selves.

While all may appear to be lost, take heart! The Sun, and the light of collective awareness, when at its nadir, is also poised to return and, in my view, rise higher in the sky than even our wildest imaginations.

Introduction

In 2008, the foundations of our national and global society began to be jolted by an increasingly powerful series of shocks. This inception of what will become humanity’s long-running emergency was predicted by astrologers; and it was foreseen by thoughtful people who pay attention to the unsustainable underpinnings of a civilization that depends on continuous expansion of material wealth while sucking from a nearly depleted non-renewable resource base of an overheating planet to survive. Sooner or later it all had to come crashing down. And it has, exactly timed to a series of astrological configurations that herald humanity’s climactic passage from a dying epoch into either a pitiful remnant on a hot, barren wasteland or a vibrant global civilization organically attuned to the needs of all life.

Let us choose life. And let us set the intention for what is happening and what is to come, both on earth and in the heavens, as a sounding bell so clear that it vibrates all humans into a higher frequency.

The Situation

Since September 2008 we have been stunned to watch the financial structures that undergird the world economy begin to melt down. Those with heightened perspective recognize that this collapse is not only inevitable, but fiendishly complex and interconnected; and that to survive this unprecedented challenge, humanity must consciously rewire itself into a collaborative, multi-faceted, interdependent and compassionate whole that transforms from a parasitic to a sustainable relationship with its planetary home.

We have just begun to enter the rapids of a collective descent that is scheduled to run ever faster, more turbulent, wider and deeper over these next few years as we head, whether we want it or not, into the infinite ocean of being. (More on that later.)

Changes on earth mirror those in the heavens. As above, so below. As below, so above. So much is happening both “up there” and “down here” that the mind reels as the ground falls out from under. The astrological situation is also unprecedented, fiendishly complex and interconnected. To sum up the most significant findings:

From 2008 through 2015 two massive types of astrological indications, each rare and significant, and together cataclysmically so, combine to propel the human race into an entirely new experience of reality.

  1. All three of the longest-cycled outer planets enter new signs, symbolic of a total transformational shift in the zeitgeist: Pluto into Capricorn (2008-2023), Uranus into Aries (2010-2017), and Neptune into Pisces (2011-2025).
  2. Two of these planets — Pluto and Uranus — combine with Saturn and Jupiter in a tense, stressful, right-angled triangle or “T-Cross” that forms and reforms in late mutable and then cardinal signs.

The aspect that anchors the T-cross, “Uranus square Pluto,” has already begun to make itself felt, and will not release until the end of 2015. So let us gear for the long haul. There will be no short-term fixes. This configuration pits radically innovative energies (Uranus) against extreme catabolic forces (Pluto).

The second of three aspects in the T-Cross, “Saturn opposite Uranus,” also began to form this year, the old (Saturn) and the new (Uranus) pulling in contradictory directions. This configuration tightened over the summer and into the fall, as the campaign for U.S. president heated up; then, in a stroke of divine choreography, on Election Day, November 4th, the opposition between Saturn and Uranus aspect reached exactness for the first time.

Saturn and Uranus continue their tug-of-war and need for integration through July 2010, going into and out of alignment three more times. While the first three oppositions pit disciplined Saturn in detail-oriented Virgo against sudden-changes Uranus in the mass-emotion of Pisces, the final opposition, on July 26, 2010, features cardinal signs of initiation — 0°25 Aries and Libra. This is another powerful signification of the new epoch we are about to enter, where the collective values of individual and local initiative, innovation and courage (Aries) must integrate with the values of fairness, justice and equality for all (Libra).

The two poles of the opposition, Saturn and Uranus, when seen from afar, define the end points of a single line. The American public elected a president whose personality appears to exhibit the best of both Saturn and Uranus. As a Saturnian authority figure, Obama is steady, calm, organized, goal-oriented, pragmatic, serious, hard-working, and values experience. As a Uranian change agent, Obama electrified the population by demonstrating mastery of the Internet and other networking tools, standing for democracy from the bottom up, and charismatically igniting the populace into realizing that we are the change we’ve been waiting for.

Background

The roots of the epochal shift now upon us can be traced to August 1987 when thousands of people gathered at sacred sites all over the world to celebrate the “Harmonic Convergence” and seed a new vibration into the atmosphere that now, 21 years later, reaches for climax in 2012.

Despite the collective fear that flows through us and tends to paralyze, we who have been internally preparing for the shift experienced the collective shudders of 2008 with an almost giddy joy, a sense of excited, exalted anticipation, the fulfillment or our intuitive knowing of what is to come. The feeling is so strong that even those who are unaware can sense the quickening: as if the heart and soul of humanity has decided to kick off the traces of the illusions that hold it hostage: money, and the things (including status) that money can buy.

Tracing the current transformation back even further, what we begin to undergo now stems back to the late ’60s, when the two outer planets Uranus and Pluto came together in the sky for the first time since the Civil War.

Not visible to the naked eye, that rare Uranus/Pluto conjunction seemed to come out of nowhere following the complacent ’50s. Its profound depth charge below the slick, complacent surface of self and society released a revolutionary energy that provided shock after life-altering shock — from civil rights, to feminism, to “free love” and folk songs and rock n’ roll, to communes and burning cities and assasinations and massive antiwar protests, all culminating in the impeachment of Nixon and a sudden, ignominious end to the Vietnam War.

Just as any cycle features four critical 90° turning points, so the first critical turn of Uranus/Pluto cycle that began in the late ’60s occurs now, 40 years later, as Uranus reaches its opening square to Pluto. The ’60s seed has sprouted, grown roots, and begins to burst through the surface. Think of the wild and shuddering events currently taking us by surprise as a celebration of this opening of the enormous space inside the Uranus/Pluto cycle that pits the original, revolutionary, radical energy of Uranus against the profound, catabolic death and rebirth energy of Pluto. Uranus breaks away from what Pluto tries and fails to hold on to. The resultant disintegration of the old releases huge nuclear energy and completely reconfigures our experience of reality. For this mushroom cloud spreads creative, innovative, courageous Uranian energy that dares to experiment with various possibilities in a open-source, collaborative group process that pools feedback on what works and what does not and synergistically amplifies the elaboration of a brand new material construct within which to integrate human life on the planet.

Whatever sign Pluto moves through undergoes a profound death-and-rebirth process. When Pluto moved through philosophical Sagittarius from 1995 — 2008, it exposed the fundamentalism and corruption at the heart of our religious, political, and capitalist ideologies. Now that Pluto moves through structural Capricorn until 2023, it is already incinerating the entrenched, centralized institutions that govern society despite their final, flailing attempts to hold on to power.

Both capitalism and its principal currency, the US dollar, are fast becoming obsolete. The new currency, human energy, though still largely invisible to mainstream media (another entrenched power) is rising fast and growing exponentially, thanks to the Internet, cell phones, and other technologies that have not proved susceptible to top-down control. We saw the initial surge of this rising human tide in the 19-month presidential race leading to the Obama victory and the resultant world exultation. We feel it in our hearts, a sort of stirring, as if the very electrons in the atoms of our cells are being stimulated, some for the very first time. As if the infinite space of possibilities is spewing out seeds in every direction and from every dimension, and we who are swirling in the middle of this seeming chaos can only surrender to a terrifying and wondrous new world.

As the old world undergoes its death throes, embers of the new world stir in its ashes now, in the seemingly quiescent dead of winter, preparing to burst forth with energy and enthusiasm come spring. By April 2009, when expansive Jupiter nears its conjunction with visionary Neptune, we will be launched into a collective summertime idealistic swoon that will repeat during November and December as the HOPE that Obama promised begins to bear fruit. This propulsion of utopian energy will further impulse the vibrational shift promised by Neptune as it got projected onto Obama-as-savior during the election season.

Of course we’ll have to get over that. And the promised oppositions of Saturn/Uranus as well as the still forming Uranus/Pluto square will provide the shocks necessary to focus us squarely on how to survive transformation so radical that it obliterates habit. Again, the stakes are huge, the old or the new, tradition or innovation, the past or the present, the NOW: the mystery inherent within each moment which, as we breathe fully into it, deepens and expands without end (Jupiter/Neptune).

How to proceed, as Obama has said, with “deliberate (Saturn) haste (Uranus)”? How to seriously (Saturn) and pragmatically (Saturn) retool (Uranus) the global village (Uranus) in a way that both makes sense (Saturn) and provides for the welfare of all (Uranus)? That question will face us all — whether consciously or unconsciously, whether with love or with fear. How we respond will determine who we are and what we will become.

The Cardinal T- Cross: Details and Timing

A “T-cross” consists of three or more planets in a right-angled triangular formation: two (or more) planets in opposition, 180° apart (in this case, Saturn and Uranus), and both of these planets square or 90° to a third planet (in this case, Pluto). I have already mentioned the strongest of these aspects: the Saturn/Uranus opposition and the Uranus/Pluto square. I have indicated that the tradition-versus-innovation Saturn/Uranus opposition will continue to form and reform through August 2010. We are also beginning to feel the effects of the deeply penetrative and revolutionary Uranus/Pluto square, though that aspect won’t be exact for the first time until June 2012 — and then continue to move back and forth, into and out of alignment six more times, until the spring of 2016.

The final aspect of the T-Cross, Saturn square Pluto, begins to form in October 2009 when we finally face the fact that Pluto obliterates any and all attempts to return to Saturn’s old, already established rules, roles and traditions. The need to let go and let in a completely different way of structuring reality will intensify through April of 2010, let up for a few months, then return to finalize matters in the summer of 2010.

Meanwhile, expansive Jupiter will enter Aries in June 2010 and conjunct revolutionary Uranus! The two will work in tandem until February 2011 to greatly amplify and proliferate already energized innovative, individual breakthroughs in ways of working with nature rather than against her to sustain and enhance life on earth.

So, to put it mildly, the tension between old, established centralized ways of doing things are going to be severely challenged by individuals and groups in their own localities all over the world. They will take the initiative to solve their own problems in ways that best meet their specific needs while self-organizing with other individuals, groups, and locales in ways that provide feedback for the common good.

I am encouraged to imagine the future in this thoroughly positive manner because of the third outer planet, Neptune, which changes signs in 2011.

Toward the Ocean of Being

Neptune, the planet that governs both our highest spiritual ideals of oneness, beauty and compassion as well as our tendencies to illusions, delusions, distractions and addictions to “evil spirits” of all kinds, enters its home sign Pisces in 2011, where it will function at its most powerful and compelling.

Since 1998, Neptune has been transiting Aquarius, where its mesmerizing capacity to unify humanity has created both trance-like mass illusions and stunning visual displays of beauty and love in group action as magnified across the globe through television, movies and the Internet. Think of the cultural diversity in the glorious sunrise ceremonies hour by hour across the globe on the millennial morning, January 1, 2000. More recently, call to mind the astonishing opening ceremonies to the Summer Olympics in 2008, when thousands of Chinese performers engaged in a precisely timed swirling mandala of color, sound and dance. And finally, remember the close-ups of entranced faces, all openly expressing awe, wonder, vulnerability and exaltation while standing shoulder to shoulder in the Chicago night as election results poured in.

Neptune will enter Pisces for the first time in 135 years on April 5, 2011, retrograde back into Aquarius from August 2011 until February 4, 2012, then return to Pisces and remain in that sign for 14 years, until 2025.

Since Pisces rules Neptune, its movement through its home sign will greatly increase its invisible, but subtly powerful, seductive effects.

Thousands upon thousands of people — perhaps millions of people, who knows? — have been engaging in awareness practices of one kind or another through meditation, contemplation, yoga and other movement disciplines since the ’60s. Books and workshops on these subjects are now so ubiquitous that in 2008 Eckhart Tolle partnered with Oprah to spread the message of presence and spaciousness to the whole world.

I have a sense that in the not too distant future our need for technological tools to create networks will drop away, as our Neptune-in-Pisces capacity for clairaudience, clairvoyance, teleportation, direct telepathic communication and sheer empathic, compassionate communion dissolve the psychic walls between us. The boundaries between the worlds will fall away — uniting those on the “other side” of the veil between life and death, uniting exterrestrial worlds and this one, uniting the many dimensions of time and space. Whereas “oneness” is now just a concept, by the time Neptune leaves Pisces in 2025 Oneness will be our common sense, as we surrender to a sensing-in-common with each other and the universe. As foretold in the prophecies of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Teilhard de Jardin’s “noosphere,” humanity is about to initiate itself as a cosmic species.

Summary and Conclusion

Neptune’s sojourn through Pisces will serve to cushion the continuous shocks produced by currently forming and reforming Saturn/Pluto/Uranus T-Cross. Rather than the expected Darwinian chaos of “every man for himself,” and “survival of the fittest,” a large enough percentage of people will recognize that what hurts one hurts all, and by extension, when we help others we help ourselves. The peaceful, compassionate presence of these forerunners will magnetize a loving, secure, expanding energetic field that will serve to center, soothe, and sustain all who are drawn into its orbit. Ultimately, humanity as a whole will realize that there is no such thing as an individual solution (Uranus) — no matter how creative. Nor does centralized control ever work (Pluto) — no matter how coercive. By consciously acknowledging, absorbing and embodying Neptune’s open-hearted, spiraling, spacious embrace we will catalyze the new world we have all been longing for since before we were born.

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Current Essays

Posted in Current Essays | March 12th, 2010 by admin

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© Ann Kreilkamp, 2007

Prelude

In love, again, a novel by Doris Lessing, the subject is a woman my age, mid-sixties, who, inexplicably, finds herself “in love” after twenty dry years in which her work had provided both purpose and fulfillment. Then, after that first shocking flutter of the heart, she found herself, over the next few months, falling in love again and again and again–with different men in turn, most of them wildly inappropriate–to the point where she had to realize that whatever “in love” meant, it had nothing to do with the men that she desired. She then fell into a leaden, depressed state where she experienced her actual physical heart as ponderously heavy, burdened with mysterious, utterly unbearable pain and desolation–and a thirst, a hunger, a longing for the Other so extreme as to make her consider suicide. As her awakening to love had astonished and embarrassed her, so the subsequent descent into an unimaginably deep dark-night-of-the-soul overwhelmed and frightened her.

Doris Lessing’s character had not enjoyed/endured my kind of experimental, peripatetic life wherein gradually, over a period of decades and a number of intense relationships, I learned, over and over again, and more and more quickly, to detach from the ecstasy and agony that love threw my way. Rather, she experienced the lover’s wild leap and devastating fall all at once, in a sort of Midsummer Night’s Dream phantasmagoria, during a year that she considered the gateway to her life’s finale. And though she did find that powerful experience instructive, in that it demonstrated her own vulnerability to what she had considered human foolishness, the novel ends almost where it began, with a stoicism now tinged with bewilderment and regret.

This essay is driven by an effort to understand and describe the door that can open when we move through the bitterness that attends our discovery of the heart’s terrible longing.

Introduction

One woman’s remark, decades ago, still reverberates in memory. We were on a ski tour at the base of the Tetons. She was dressed in parka, muffler, gloves, headband, and–earrings! I asked her, why earrings?

“Because I’m still the huntress,” she replied, very matter of fact.

She was single at the time. I was married.

She’s right. The state of “being single” does seem to be accompanied by its own set of accessories, not to mention states of mind. I wince to remember years of being seized awake in the middle of the night by fixations on men that sparked feelings in various shades of seeking, keeping, coveting, letting go, regretting, wondering, wishing, longing, pretending, hoping, and obsessing.

These internal states accompany any woman still “on the hunt.” And, since I worked as a professional astrologer, while lying there at 2 A.M. tensed with desire, frustration, hurt, regret and/or bitterness I would also flip men’s charts up on the insides of my eyelids and compare them to my own chart, one after another. Unlike counting sheep, this intricate analysis would jerk me into hyper-alertness. I’d bound out of bed, grab the astrological ephemeris, look again for clues. Who is Mr. Right? Who is The One? Will I ever find him? Or, how did I let him get away? How could he have left me?

You know the drill.

I’m so glad it’s over.

My family is glad it’s over too. Yet one of my nieces tells me that her mother, a devout Catholic, still keeps my picture on her bedside table and prays for me nightly.

But what, exactly, is “over”? Intimate relationships with men? At sixty-four, do I now I head into old age with head bowed, forever widowed? Somehow, I doubt it. I remain an exquisitely alive and sensuous human, wildly attracted to other humans. And I remain dedicated to both experience and understanding of male/female relationships as primary fuel for the human evolutionary thrust.

My family looks upon my peripatetic path with curiosity and alarm. I, in turn, view their long-term partnerships with curiosity and bemusement. What would my life have been like had I followed this path? And what would I have learned from such a life–not to mention, when would I have known I learned it? Not until my deathbed, I suspect. Who knows what goes on inside our deepest being while we still move through time; and inside the common core of a couple may reside what I have come to revere as the holy of holies–a mystery I don’t ever expect to fathom.

I realize that last statement is ambiguous.

Do I mean that I don’t pretend to understand what goes on inside the heart of long-term couples? Yes. I certainly do mean that. And though I don’t understand them, I’ve observed some marriages over the decades, including those of my parents, my seven siblings and one of my sons.

I have learned to respect their commitments, and to rejoice in their capacity for longevity, for I can sense how each person has deepened, over time, as an individual. In this chaotic era of fractured families, mine is unusual in that, for most of its members, marriage does apparently serve as an alchemical vessel for personal and interpersonal transformation.

I bless them. Though I do not fathom what they have, I sense it well worth having.

But the other implication unsettles me. For it could mean that I don’t expect to ever engage in another long-term male/female relationship in this life. Is this true? And if so, why? Because it’s too late, I’m too old at 64? Well, certainly, too old to ever celebrate a 60-year anniversary, like my parents did a few years ago. But not too old for say, 10-, or 20-, or maybe even a 30-year run.

Would I want that? I’m not sure. First of all, the obvious: most men my age, and some years younger, not only look and act, but actually are physiologically older than I, sinking into decrepitude. They did not institute healthful food and exercise patterns when younger, and now bulge with bellies, varicosities, and florid, swollen faces. Their backs hurt, they take medication, their shoulders hunch, they limp, they’re probably impotent–all turnoffs, and not just from a standpoint of physical attraction. I can see the writing on the wall: sooner or later, and most likely sooner, I’d have to sacrifice my own life and needs as a caregiver.

So, from a purely selfish perspective, why would I want to nurse a man with whom I had no history through old age, illness, death?

On the other hand, I imagine that if we had schlepped comfortably through morning and evening routines for decades, we would hardly have noticed when our skin lost its luster and our hands started to shake; our rich and detailed memories–of children, crises overcome, trips taken, mutual friendships, homes and careers lived in and let go–all food for thought and endless stories–would have cemented a shared reality. Moreover, any friction in our early years would have sloughed off the dross; we’d be reduced to a bright clear flame, a singularity long fed by the encouragement of the one other who knows and cherishes us, warts and all.

In such a context, of a loving, long-term companionship, I imagine that by the time one of us grew more frail than the other, or got sick or disabled, the stronger, healthier one would naturally surrender to the other’s increasing need, no matter what the sacrifice required, or for how long.

But meeting a man when he’s old? Getting the downside with none of the goodies?

How crass this sounds. Makes me want to issue a challenge to the Other who would dare to greet me, soul to soul. Hey you! Surprise me! Shine your full self through that decaying bag of bones!

In actuality, I don’t even know if I’d like surprises. Not now. Not anymore. Or, is this just a crone’s time-out?

Individuation

I’m astonished to recognize that for the first time in my life I feel complete, whole; that I no longer seem to need to project parts of myself onto men.

I’ve enjoyed this new sense of internal integration for perhaps the past six months, and I must say it feels strange, alien, as if a different person occupies this body.

I’m not used to the sense that there’s nothing left to “do” in the arena of relationships, that just to “be” on my own, in company with others on occasion but more often alone, is enough. Indeed, I dare say that this new status feels fine; indeed, luxurious, immensely satisfying.

Jung would call my new sense of internal wholeness “individuation,” since I have apparently succeeded–at least for now!–in letting go of projections onto men, which means, in psychoanalytic terms, that I’ve internally integrated the various animus figures that I so desperately sought in the outside world. Rather than needing to magnetize a man with this or that set of qualities as my companion, I seem to have uncovered these qualities in myself and feel quite content.

I have yet to find a woman with whom I can discuss this still new internal state-change. Most of my female friends are either married, still on the hunt or trying to land a skittish partner, or they are done with relationships–not because they feel internally whole, but because either they feel they’re too old and/or their so-called “failed relationships” have left them bitter and cynical.

I don’t fit into any of those categories. For, despite my “newly integrated” condition and my apparent “time-out,” I still find myself in mutual frisson with men. I do not pursue these attractions, but I do enjoy them.

So, What is love?

When we meet another for whom we feel a romantic attraction, we tend to describe our initial hook-up as “falling in love.” Within six months to two years, the intensity of the initial attraction normally fades, or at least ratchets way down. The great light that seemed to emanate from the Other has been turned off, stripping them of beauty, brains, sensitivity, range of interests, talents, animal magnetism, experience, and so on–whatever it was that drew us to them in the first place. This on/off switch is so remarkable that sooner or later the more psychologically-minded cannot help but realize that the phrase “in love” actually means “in projection”–an illusion produced by the intensely creative power of our own needs, hopes and expectations.

For the Doris Lessing character this discovery came as a shock. Or it may steal in gradually, as the initial magical state of complete immersion in the other fades to the day-to-day reality of two very different people “trying to get along.” If the relationship weathers our disappointment, then we usually describe the reason we stayed together as “we love each other.”

But what does this really mean? As the song says, “What is this thing called love?”

It seems that we all experience “love” as the greatest value in human life, what we long for and can never get enough of. And of course, on a more exalted level, all religions speak of Love as the underlying reality of God.

But I have noticed that, here on Earth, “once the honeymoon is over” then “I love you” segues into something much more prosaic.

Our lives are now joined. Children, mortgages, money, work struggles, our different dreams–all clamor for attention. We cope with various addictions and insecurities. How we move together through the constant interruptions, complexities and difficulties of sheer dailiness says a lot about our willingness to lay down personal agendas and blend with our partner to forge a common life. Some do this more easily than others, and not necessarily because they are more “loving.” Each of us comes in with a unique, original nature, with some more suited to the adjustments that partnership requires.

In the 20th century, up through the 1950s we could pretty much take for granted male/female behavior in primary relationships as based on “roles” thought to be traditional and biological, not to mention theological: the man leads, the woman follows; the man works to provide economically for the woman whose place is in the home with their children. This thoroughly pragmatic arrangement secured stability in both family and society.

Then all hell broke loose. Starry-eyed hippies determined to bust out of all roles and bring “Love,” conceived as spontaneity and authenticity, back into the world. “Peace, love, dope” utopian idealism soon wrestled with another, equally strong trend, that of angry feminists demanding male/female power redistribution. The fallout from this glaringly contradictory set of influences was, as we now realize, both extremely potent and decidedly mixed.

Forty years later, when we look at the psychological dynamics of most male/female relationships today, they seem to fit into one or more of the following categories:

In some relationships, one naturally leads and the other follows. In others, partners take turns, or each leads in certain areas. Or they don’t. Instead, one dominates and the other obeys–or appears to. Sometimes the submissive one is actually passive/aggressive, gets what he or she wants through surreptitious means.

Any of these relationships might call themselves “loving;” I would rather describe them as, just as in the ’50s, thoroughly practical: though society has relaxed its ideas as to which gender fits into which role, and though sometimes roles may overlap or reverse, the partners still play roles and still make it their main business as a couple to negotiate their separate needs, giving (or giving in) in exchange for getting.

In some cases, of course, one person refuses to give in, despite what the other wishes, and must then either tolerate complete subjugation, or leave. Or, the two compete for dominance. Though these kinds of unions usually end badly, others seem to live for the struggle and are addicted to drama.

Like me. I needed total control, so I had to fall and gnash my teeth over and over again in subtle or blatant battles with lovers. And when I wasn’t embattled I was licking my wounds, obsessing on what went wrong and how to make it right again. Like a lightning bolt streaking in slow motion through time, my life jerked between exalted highs and despairing lows. I identified aliveness with intensity.

Loss

Now, after more than forty years of relationship experience as an adult, I would say that the crucial test of what we glibly call “love” comes when we endure some kind of sustained loss. When the beloved dies or leaves or betrays us, reveals him- or herself to be utterly “Other,” not at all what we had imagined in our “in love” phase. Or, for those like Doris Lessing’s character who live at a more self-aware level, when we realize that the qualities we had ascribed to our lover were actually projections of our own unconscious needs. In either case, our discovery hurls us from the heights of “love” into the abyss. We slog through bewilderment, abandonment, disillusionment, grief.

But then what?

How do we respond to our suffering?

When in pain, it is natural for warm-blooded critters to shut down, curl into a fetal position, and wait to either die or get better. Our gut instinct is to close our hearts and build a defensive wall against further hurt.

Shut down, armored against our agony, there seem to be three alternative ways to proceed: we “make do” with our situation, though cynical, with greatly diminished expectations; we engage in a campaign to try to change the other; or, we leave, and quickly or eventually cast about for another with whom to enter the same song and dance.

The first choice drops us into the land of the living dead. Since we have squelched our life force, nothing new can happen. The hardening of our heart accelerates the march towards death of the physical body and meanwhile, we cannot help but leak or spew negativity, contaminating our environment.

The second choice is the one I have jumped into, time after time, though I’ve long known better. And of course, it never works, just creates polarity and conflict as the Other fights for his own life. All along, this choice is fraught with delusion: I inflate, seeing what I do as “helping” or “serving,” and so feel heroic; then, when the Other refuses, I deflate into victimization and martyrhood, not to mention frustration, resentment, bitterness, depression.

More rarely, we take this mode to the extreme–turn violent, try to force the other, dominate, or, if necessary, crush the Other.

The third alternative, “cut and run”–is more often the man’s choice. Women are likely to try the second alternative–for years–always with the hope that that “if I love him enough, he will learn to love me.” Finally, conceding defeat, but still assuming the grass is always greener, we leave one partner, blame him for what went wrong, re-enter the hunt and wonder why the next partner resembles the first!

A Fourth Alternative

In the past few years I have discovered a fourth alternative. And that is to remain open and vulnerable–no matter what, no matter how much it hurts. In fact, I have discovered that if I do what seems counter-intuitive at the time, if I truly surrender to the pain of loss, then it is as if I come upon a secret door that I did not even know existed. And this door, I soon realize, opens into a room filled with what I have been seeking all along: love’s gold, love’s treasure.

What I suggest here may sound both absurd (who wants to be a masochist?) and absurdly simple (it can’t be that easy!)–but don’t get me wrong. Though it may seem stupid and simplistic to ordinary consciousness, in my experience such surrender is extremely difficult in practice. Not only my instincts, but the conditioning of my entire life militates against it.

To intentionally touch into my own terrible emotional wound defies both instinct and common-sense.

I do it anyway.

In this exercise, I deliberately and voluntarily move awareness into the place in my body where the pain is centered. In my 40s, I would feel as if someone had kicked me in the solar plexus with a boot; in my 60s, I feel pain more in my heart, as if an elephant stands on my chest.

Now I can look upon the difference between the two locations and note my own progress. For my center of gravity does seem to have shifted from the solar plexus chakra (the power center, where I learn the limits of my own power) to the heart chakra (where I allow the heart to open and attune to others with no expectations).

Up through my 40s, whenever emotional/physical pain threatened to take me under I would instantly cathect into my mind, my ego–and stay there–so that I would not double up in agony, not stay in bed all day. Desperately, my ego mind would make up ideas as to why I was feeling so terrible and dwell there–on someone in the outside or inside world (present, past, or imagined future) who had “caused” me to recoil. My obsession with the Other as cause of my pain was an unconscious attempt to distract me from my body’s painful feelings and served to justify them so that I could feel better, or superior, to the Other.

Like everyone else in a culture inherited from Rene Descartes who coined the phrase “I think, therefore I am,” and who labeled the body a machine, completely separate from the mind, my mind was me and my body an inconvenient encumbrance that I had to drag along behind.

This process, of reflexively slipping out of my body into my mind, continues. Patterns, imprinted from birth, cling.

And yet, strong as this pattern is, from my early 20s on I have also felt intermittently driven by a very strong conscious need to let it go.

Self-Remembering

As a young wife and mother in a life in which I felt increasingly trapped, forlorn and desperate, I would take long daily walks, bumping the stroller down cobblestone streets to Harvard Square on a quest, but for what, what? Then came the life-changing day in which the proverbial book fell off the shelf into my hand, opened to a page in which its author, Immanuel Ouspensky, a disciple of the Russian mystic and mathematician Gurdjieff, threw down the gauntlet that ignited my inner fire.

Most humans, he said, have no free will. Rather than being awake, we sleep-walk through life as mechanical beings, caught in a vicious round of conditioned patterns. We think we make conscious choices, when actually we react automatically to inside or outside stimuli.

Those who do have free will, he claimed, are very, very rare, since free will is a difficult accomplishment that takes many years. Ouspensky said that in order to even begin to develop free will, Gurdjieff advocated a practice called “self-remembering.”

Even at that early age I recognized instantly that he was right, I was clicking through my life like a robot. Yet to actually face the fact that I was unconsciously being pulled by strings over which I had no control infuriated me. I decided to get a grip on myself. To develop my own free will. To “wake up.”

In order to begin to interrupt unconscious patterns of behavior I instructed myself to be able to stop in the midst of any activity and say “I’m here!” Simply that. “I am here.” So, while brushing my teeth, or changing my child’s diapers, or walking down the street, or writing a paper, I began to practice this method of suddenly stopping whatever I was doing simply to acknowledge my own presence in the midst of the buzzing confusion of my life with husband, children, graduate school in philosophy, and, of course, my hyperactive, judging, chattering brain.

It was not long before I found myself astonished to discover that self-remembering actually worked, that it did help me to “wake up”–momentarily; but then, like an automaton, I would slip back into oblivion. Intuitively, I knew that only if I learned how to consistently “wake up” as if out of a dream in the middle of any point in my day, and then eventually, to actually stay awake during any and all circumstances, no matter how dire or exciting, would I be able to take full charge of my life.

I can look back now and say that an enormous gulf separates the capacity to wake up momentarily and the infinitely more difficult goal of being able to hold a larger awareness over time. Luckily, I didn’t know that then, or I might have grown discouraged.

Though I didn’t realize it then, “self-remembering” was my initiation into the practice of conscious awareness. Awareness is the holy grail, always on the horizon, luring me on. Forty years later, I’m still on automatic much of the time, and yet more and more I can stay awake for minutes, even hours. More rarely, most of a whole day. At this point I wake up (and fall back) hundreds of times each day, as monkey mind once again lures me into its seductive snares. Little by little I stitch together those moments of awareness so that the current of the flow becomes (almost!) continuous–an exquisitely alive sense of being here, right here, right now, in this body, at this time, in these surroundings, all senses attuned, at one with the whole.

And each time I do, everything changes. I find myself awake and aware, steady and serene in the midst of the daily flux.

Conscious Suffering

By the time I reached my 40s, it was easy for me to wake up momentarily; but I could not stay awake, since I had not yet learned to move awareness into the body. As a typical Cartesian, I had been conditioned to despise my body and force it to obey my will. So learning how to deliberately move my mind into my body has been huge deal.

Of course what shoots us out of our bodies in the first place is our experience of pain. From the time we are tiny we are admonished: “don’t cry, be brave.” We gradually learn to suppress the tears and howls of our natural response to pain so that we may “fit” into society.

In the past few years, in order to undo all this conditioning, in order to move into my own pain and stay there I now attempt to catch my mind at the instant it tries to take over with “reasons” for why I feel so bad. Each time, to notice justifications as they arise and let them go. Let the ideas go, whatever they are, true or false, right or wrong, doesn’t matter. What matters that I climb down under my mind and surrender to the feelings that have been triggered once again, by some situation in the outer or inner world that has re-stimulated an old, original, childhood(?) wound.

Whatever the original wound is, doesn’t matter either. Causes upon cause, an infinity of causes! Perhaps there is no root cause, just simply the suffering that attends incarnation. In any case, as incorporated beings we humans are conditioned to develop minds that separate out from our bodies and try to squash, or squeeze or stuff them into some kind of shape that meets with the mind’s (and the culture’s) version of what the body is supposed to feel and to look like.

Conscious Suffering and Presence

This second, more advanced stage of the practice of “waking up,” that of conscious suffering, of deliberately and intentionally centering awareness directly into the place in my body that corresponds to my emotional pain–opens another door to the unexpected. Rather than intensify suffering, such focused awareness of suffering sooner or later disperses it to the point where it disappears inside a further heart-opening into what I can only describe as an all-pervasive Presence that steals in as a calm, detached, but joyfully alive awareness lying just below all my judgments and resentments and woundedness–and in fact all the mind-stuff that I then no longer need to rely on!

As a result of this practice, my need for intense drama in relationship has mutated into a near-continuous feeling of immense gratitude. Such a privilege–to be alive in a body on this beautiful earth at this critical time in history! Gratitude is continually fueled by periodic experiences of consciously allowing in the suffering that attends loss, for the practice of awareness has begun to drop me into this larger reality on a more regular and extended basis. The awareness of Presence–of the all-pervasive Love that unites and breathes through all creation–may be what mystics have hinted at for centuries.

As I continue to open further, the realization dawns that unlike “being in love,” the big Love does not require another person as its “object.” Rather, I am immersed in an ocean of Love that has no beginning and no end and includes us all as aspects of its singular Being. And Love is a fountain, it fuels my every move, showers blessings on one and all.

Presence in Relationship

I imagine that this experience of Presence is similar to the experience of those in a committed relationship where, when they disagree, both partners surrender their personal wills. Time after time, they dare to release control and jump, blindfolded and holding hands, into the void. These refined humans realize that their relationship itself is a third entity, a real energetic substance, the child or fruit of their dissolved egos. And they recognize that their relationship has needs that sometimes supercede the desires of either individual.

Surrender to relationship opens the heart–to what is, rather than what we wish it to be, to the reality of the present moment, to the Presence that undergirds us all–and requires radical trust on both individuals’ parts. Both are vulnerable, since either could, if desired, trounce the other, manipulate the situation to get what they want.

The widow of one such rare couple told me that it was two years before she could let go of her own needs and attend to his, two years before, she said, the moment came when she just let go, finally, of her life-long self-centered pattern in relationship. “I remember the moment,” she said, “the single moment which changed my life.” I asked her if the moment came in response to him. “Yes,” she replied. “Suddenly something he said made me realize that he wanted the very best for me, that he would dedicate his life to my happiness.” And with his surrender, came her own. From then on, she would do anything for him to be happy. From that moment on, love was the center of their union, and when he developed a brain tumor, she dedicated herself to his needs for their final two years. “My attitude was, whatever he wanted, he got,” she tells me with a smile. When he died, consciously breathing his last in her presence, their 12-year union was complete and they could let each other go.

We might call this kind of emotional/spiritual surrender to Presence in relationship an evolved form of love-making.

For those who have begun this journey into the open heart, the words “I love you” become almost irrelevant. Though an insecure partner may still want to hear those magic three words, for the other, love is a given. “Of course, I love you. Doesn’t everything I do show it?”

And yet, just as on the world stage nations still compete for dominance, so loving surrender in personal relationships still seems rare. Most of still pursue our own agendas and trivialize the phrase “I love you” by giving it lip service. We mouth the words, while our hearts lie elsewhere.

We say “I love you,” to convince ourselves, or to satisfy the other’s need or demand for reassurance. “I love you” turns into shorthand for “we’re still together, don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.” And this remark can mask the desolation of deep denial, wherein fear of loss trumps our secret resentment of the one we pretend to still “love.”

From my observations, and from my one experience with a relatively long-term relationship, I suspect that even the most conscious committed relationships are based at least in part on a sometimes little-noticed and habitual co-dependency that deftly and subtly worms its way into the interstices of daily life. For example, I recently had lunch with a friend who is going through a quite-uncharacteristic hard time. She tells me that her companion of thirty years has been “great,” but that he “hates it when I become vulnerable.” I sensed that she viewed this as evidence of his love, and could not resist the remark: “That’s because he’s the one that’s used to being vulnerable, with you as his mother. It scares him when his mother leaves.” She looked at me in amazement. Far from taking offense, it was as if I had struck a match in the cave of her mind.

And what is long-term co-dependency but a stabilized form of projection, a remnant of, a left-over crystallization from the “in love” phase?

Knights on White Horses

When I was a child, our common human longing took mythical form that girls in my generation translated literally: the “knight on the white horse,” the “one and only” soul-mate who would whisk us away from ordinary life to “life happily ever after.”

We set ourselves up for disappointment. And, as ever, personal crises, when collectively enacted, describe cultural shifts.

In the past fifty years, as more and more marriages break and new ones form, as some people live together without marriage and others remain single, either in solitude or to “play the field,” the more metaphysical among us have begun to speak of “soul-mates,” a whole tribe of beings that we “came in with,” any number of whom can serve as karmic-mates at different points on our individual journeys.

Despite the blare of corporate, national, tribal and media wars, on a more personal level our way of considering relationships seems to be growing more relaxed and inclusive, less polarized. Now, at holiday tables, extended families reach beyond blood-ties to include former lovers, husbands, in-laws and step-children. Clint Eastwood’s two celebrated war movies, back to back, empathize with first American, then Japanese experiences at Iwo Jima in World War II. Many of us are as concerned with Iraqi casualties as we are with American ones, and Benetton’s colors not only advertise fashion, but also the beauty in ethnic variation.

From our growing acceptance of inclusion, it is only a short step to realize that, special and unique as our love for one special and unique Other may feel to us at the time, this state of being is actually a first step into an extended transition zone that links the surface phenomenon of “being in love” to the transcendent heights and immanent depths of cosmic Love.

Most of us have had experience of the first kind of love–the “puppy love” of projection. Far fewer experience a long-term relationship that helps each partner efface the membrane that divides her or him from the universe. And those individuals who actually do evolve into the greater Love that requires no object, but shines from the inside out, equally, over all–Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi–though so rare as to seem iconic, are actually way-showers for the Oneness into which I sense we are all, sooner or later, destined to enter.

Divine Love

Various philosophers and spiritual teachers speak of “Love” as the most powerful force known, the glue that holds the universe together, the substratum of all imaginings, all daily events; “Love” as constant, serene, joyful generosity, the deep oceanic depths below the surface currents of desire and suffering.

I doubt that when we say we “love” someone, we usually refer to this sacred numinous reality. Because if we did truly have the capacity to enter the divinity of Love, why would we remain with one person rather than another?

Both Gandhi and Buddha left their wives behind in their quest for the larger Love. And if the Magdalene was the wife of Jesus, she wasn’t an acknowledged part of his mission to spread Love to all humankind. Presumably, once we have opened our hearts to the larger all-pervasive power of Love, we remain open and loving, no matter who our companion. Like saints and avatars, we love all equally.

Embodied Love

So this, for me, brings up a question. As one who does seem to have integrated at least my former projections, now what? Is a personal relationship possible or necessary? Or do I turn my gaze to the stars.

And yet, I am an embodied being. As long as I work in time and space, my intimate relations with others are limited, or seemingly limited, to one at a time. I imagine it would be easier to channel divine Love through the sexual/sensual/spiritual connection with a single Other whom I have learned, over time, to trust. I would have left the preliminaries behind, no longer slogging through the projection stage with a series of possible partners. Instead, like the rare couple mentioned above, I would have magnetized one with whom, in a single moment of grace, each of us would drop our selfishness and dedicate our lives to the other’s welfare. Together, we would weather the hard stuff.

And it would all be worth it! For on the other side of that hard stuff would come the mystical payoff: our interpersonal interaction would serve as a conduit through which divine love channels into the world.

At this point, I speak theoretically, since I have never had the experience that I point to above, at least in this life. But I do sense its reality. Just as I sensed the possibility of internal integration before it was gifted to me, also like grace. And I do sense that sexual/sensual/spiritual union with the Other might be the surest access into Oneness, since sexual lovemaking is its physical expression, the petit mort wherein we momentarily die to ourselves and are transported into a larger universe. But of course, it doesn’t last. Ecstasy fades, and we fall back, wrapped in separate skin and bone scaffolding.

Towards the One

In recent years, I have noticed that my relationships of whatever kind–even the split second, consciously enacted, deep eye-to-eye with a stranger as we pass by on the street– can startle me to the point of dissolving that seeming separation. And if this is so, then physical love-making, though it symbolizes Oneness, is not necessary. Ultimately not even personal, one-to-one connections with others are necessary, since on an interior level, we are all connected, and always have been. The meditative solitary awareness of the monk in a cave expands to include all sentient beings.

I now view any surrender in relationship, large or small, momentary or extended, as grist for the divine mill. Each time I let go of my own personal will, I am invited to further efface the membrane that separates me from others, and enter the abiding presence.

I sense that, though we tend to think that what holds a long-term monogamous relationship together beyond the honeymoon phase, beyond the child-rearing phase, beyond and within any particular phase, is on an outer level, some combination of economics, tradition, security, shared interests and companionship, on an inner level, the level of the Real, of the One what holds a relationship together may be quite different: this universal soul-longing for reunion with the all-pervading essence of life.

And, from this higher point of view, our universal fascination with the magnetic projection of “falling in love” and “being in love” may be but symptom and symbol of the mystical oceanic Love that shimmers through space and melts all forms into Oneness.

Conclusion

Most of us think of our love for our long-term mates as “special and unique.” Instead, it may behoove us to see both our dance with the other and our eventual loss of the other as an extended transition zone. At first, we experience mere flashes, then, if we are fortunate and grace descends, longer and periods when we do actually surrender to the actual suchness of our beloved, no matter who he is, nor how much the Other disappointed or infuriated us in the days when had expectations of who he or she should be.

No expectations. Not even as to whether our Beloved will stay or go. For though our bodies and minds suffer the pain of letting go, our spirits ultimately soar. As we practice surrender in love and to Love over and over again, we begin to become aware of the larger Presence that holds the universe together.

The key seems to be to recognize that our emotional state in relationship with “a certain someone,” though at the time important and special and wonderful and/or terrible, on another level is merely the latest trigger for the Love that resides inside us always and the discovery of which is the larger purpose of which we are born. It appears that no matter what specific dramas we choose to enact, the direction is always towards the eventual full activation of this greatest of all powers.

I end with selections from two poems of the Sufi poet, Rumi:

I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
Look at your eyes, they are small but they
see enormous things.

Gamble everything for love … Don’t wait any longer. Silent, absent, walking an empty road, all praise.



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