An Uncommon Bond

by jeff brown

  That night, I lay awake in a burning pool of anguish, as reality had its harsh way with me. There is no doubt that the soul and the body are inextricably linked. I tremored and shook all night, as my body registered the ending of my once-in-a-lifetime soul love. It was as though a cosmic umbilical cord had been severed, one that had been nourishing our twin-ship for all eternity. I woke up in the morning untethered and adrift in an ocean of despair. Now what? Where do I go after God? Clearly I had made the greatest mistake a warrior can ever make. I had let my shield down so low that I couldn’t raise it back up to protect me.

  Truth Time

  I felt deformed in her absence, stumbling through my days in a bloodied haze. The depth of pain was beyond imagining, as a soulnami of suffering flooded my consciousness without respite. Everything, everywhere, hurt. Instead of fighting my way to the surface, I soon found myself resigned to my own demise. It felt better to let myself die than live with this loss. My lifeline had already been severed.

  I began to look for ways to anesthetize myself. In support of my efforts, Daniel did what male best friends do. He brought me self-altering substances—pot and whiskey in generous doses. Sadly, pot and whiskey together make strange grief-fellows, taking me further into the angst.

  In the hope of numbing me further, Daniel began bringing his spiritual books with him every time he popped in with the drugs. Sensing that my suffering might create an opening to his ideas, he would sit and read to me. He called it “Truth Time.” At first the timing was perfect.

  Before we got to it, he would lead me on a mindfulness meditation. I closed my eyes and focused on my pained breath. Then he would invite me to watch my feelings float down the river: “Don’t identify with them, just watch them leave the screen.” And it would work. The more I watched them float, the further I got from my torment. And sometimes more than feelings floated away. Sometimes I imagined Sarah floating away, getting smaller in the distance.

  Then he would read to me, slowly, with equanimity, in the calm, measured tenor of non-duality teachers. For a number of nights it was the perfect antidote for my tortured heart. I would close my eyes, slow and deepen my breath, and savor the fleeting feeling of calm. It became the one thing I looked forward to at the end of most days, a momentary spell of relief from my chronic state of torment.

  One evening, something shifted while he was reading two excerpts from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now:

  The pain-body may seem to you like a dangerous monster that you cannot bear to look at, but I assure you that it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot prevail against the power of your presence.

  ...the pain-body doesn’t want you to observe it directly and see it for what it is. The moment you observe it, feel its energy field within you, and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. A higher dimension of consciousness has come in. I call it presence. You are now the witness or the watcher of the pain-body. This means that it cannot use you anymore by pretending to be you, and it can no longer replenish itself through you. You have found your own innermost strength. You have accessed the Power of Now.

  While he was reading it, an unexpected wave of pleasureful memories flowed through me. The depth of longing, our first exquisite lovemaking in the temple, the hand-holding walks in the forest, the cuddling on the futon in the mornings, that night when we danced by the firelight on Toronto Island, the vastness of our soulscape. The memories began to melt me open. I could feel my body feeling again, remembering what it was to live. It became clear: this witnessing technique was not for me. It brought temporary respite—in moments of great distress, at times when a vaster perspective is essential—but at this point, I felt like I was just locking myself inside with my own pain-body ‘monster.’ I was paying cerebral attention to my wounds without actually transforming them. And closing off the pain-body ‘monster’ with witnessing techniques also meant closing off the joy body, the memories of delight—you can’t sever one without the other. As a well-practiced head-tripper, I knew that game well—hiding from feelings in a witnessing consciousness and calling the resulting pseudo-equanimity ‘healthy’ and ‘enlightened.’ Was it, or was it simply another way to bypass challenging feelings?

  Suddenly, I began to revolt against Daniel’s messages. Although I liked the ‘idea’ of witnessing and observing my pain, I didn’t like the non-feeling of it. I didn’t do all this work in my life to heal and open my heart, only to close it down the moment suffering entered my life. What was the real drug—the pot we were smoking, or the philosophies Daniel was articulating? Watch your feelings float down the river—is it that simple? Presence happens when you witness your painful emotions? Huh? But how can I be in the moment if I disconnect from my feelings? How can I be present if I haven’t worked through the unresolved pain-body? What linear, patriarchal, head-trippy version of the moment is that? Won’t those feelings impede my presence? Won’t they come back to haunt me? Are they really monstrous, or is there something fundamentally human at the heart of them? Don’t you have to move through a deepening feeling process before you can come to a genuine feeling of peace? And isn’t healing and resolution essential to my expansion? How will I grow and mature if I don’t work through the pain-body material?

  Yes, I did want some relief from the pain—but not at the expense of fully and deeply living. As pained as I was, some part of me still wanted presence to be a whole being experience. I still wanted to be here for all of it.

  After we smoked another joint and drank a little more whiskey, Daniel began to read from the book of his new favorite spiritual teacher—American born Hindu-wannabe Krishna Roy McMaster. His book Transcending the Hurt Locker was a best-seller among those who had given up on therapeutic process. I knew McMaster from my seeking days, when I sat before him for a long weekend while he spewed the oddest concoction of positive thinking affirmations, Sanskrit pseudo-wisdoms, and strangely disorienting disembodiment teachings, while incessantly sipping a drink he called “Wisdom Juice” from an oak barrel with a crazy straw shaped like the Elephant God Ganesh. I hadn’t realized how much he pissed me off back then, but today, it all came clear.

  As Daniel read, my mind drifted into the most vivid daydream, one where my contempt for ungrounded spiritualities had an opportunity to be expressed in all its savagery.

  In it, McMaster was sitting in my living room doing one of his teaching-monologues, in his irritatingly calm know-it-all voice, waving his hands around while sipping from Ganesh. Suddenly, I lost my no-mind and lunged across the room, knocking him to the ground with one push, spilling his wisdom juice all over the floor. Then I got down on top of him and smacked him hard on the side of his face: “How does your no-body feel now, transcendent one? Shall we witness it from afar? Where’s your monkey mind when you need it?” With him crumpled up on the ground, his elephant head straw lying on the hardwood beside him, my rage turned nastier, “Why do you look so shaken, you fuckin’ new age twinky? It’s all a crazy illusion, isn’t it? Where’s your compassion for my anger?” He got up, and bolted for the front door, but I beat his no-body to it, standing firmly against it. Apparently, I had more of an issue with spiritual bypassing than I realized. Confronted with a ticking time bomb, he wisely turned around and raced to the back door, scooping his Ganesh straw up off the floor as he fled. I went out after him, determined to finish my monologue: “How does ‘All One’ feel now, great Mixmaster? What—you haven’t forgiven me, yet? Non-attach, non-attach!!? That was then, THIS IS NOW!”

  After revisiting and refining my fantasy a few times, I began to laugh, interfering with my best friend’s reading. “What... what’s so funny?” he asked in the most serious of tones.

  I opened my eyes and looked at him fondly. “Nothing, dear friend, nothing. This just isn’t working for me.” And then I asked him to take his drugs and books and go.

  How ironic, McMaster the Master Detacher had driven me back to the world of feeling.

  The Blame Train

 
Moments after he left, I wished he would return. I missed my no-pain body! Without detachment practices as a buffer, I was back to nonstop misery with no relief… shit! There was a kind of madness circulating inside, a dark and torturous mix of rage and heartbreak that felt too powerful to feel, and too powerful not to. How do you get the strength to grieve when your heart, the very source of your strength, is torn asunder?

  I needed a sabbatical from work. The next morning, I contacted two of my colleagues to take over my practice until I was ready to return. I had two trials coming up—a theft and a sexual assault, and I was in no condition to take them on. The thought of doing the sexual assault was particularly upsetting. After all, Sarah had used sex to assault me. Criminal law was getting too close to home.

  My pain deteriorated into an overwhelming sense of confusion as the reality strengthened its grip. In only a few short months, I had gone from armored warrior to receptive lover, from deep isolation to profound connection, from soulmate to sole-fool.

  I grappled for optimism, a forward-moving philosophy, anything to keep me afloat. Perhaps this is the way it has to be as a matter of evolutionary stages. Perhaps the soul can’t go from the mundane to a fully actualized soulmate experience this quickly. Perhaps the process demands an opening that can’t be fully actualized, a karmic taste test before the next level of cosmic penetration. Perhaps I was being prepared for an even greater love along the path.

  There was only one problem with this theory. There wasn’t going to be any greater love—not likely! More likely, I was just fucked with by the universe. But why? Why?

  Perhaps the greatest source of confusion was how to re-establish my sense of separate self. In merging with Sarah, I had experienced a genuine dissolution of my individual self. Love had reached inside of me and reshaped me in its relational image. I felt such peace in that, as though I had returned to my wholeness, my true essence, after lifetimes alone. But how, now, was I to understand myself? I wasn’t a man, as I had understood manliness, and I wasn’t a separate self any longer. I wasn’t Lowen, alone—and yet I was. How, now, was I to return to an integrated form? To know myself as something separate from that merging? To know where I end and the other begins? I was like a baby learning how to walk, except this time I was stepping out with busted feet.

  And it was about more than just my merging with Sarah. It was also about my relationship with the universe. In her divine presence, the gateway to unity had swung wide open, bridging my consciousness, my very identity, with an entirely different universe of meaning. Fueled by our love, I had entered a vaster, richer terrain—one that up-framed the banality of daily life and reflected the divine possibilities at the heart of every birth. But now what? I was sitting at the precipice of the universe, all opened up with no place to go. How do you readjust to earthly life after a tour of the cosmos? How could I sustain this awareness without her? Where do you go from God?

  Perhaps this is why it’s so very difficult to lose a soulmate. You don’t just lose your companion. You don’t just lose your friend. You don’t just lose your lover. You lose your portal to divinity. You lose your gateway to God. You lose the whole bloody universe.

  My confusion soon turned to anger. At first it was directed at Sarah. I wrote one unsent letter after another expressing my disdain for her behavior: “How could you desacralize us in that way? How could you refuse God’s invitation?” I hit the futon with a baseball bat, cursing her with furious abandon. I drove the highways late at night, screaming at her at the top of my lungs. But none of it changed anything. After every release, I would come back to the same feeling—love. She was still my heart’s beloved. She was still lodged in my cells. It just felt so sad to be without her.

  I needed a much bigger target. I soon turned my attention to God, the orchestrator of this heartless horror. I sat down one night and put my anger to words:

  Dear God,

  Why the hell did you create this,

  you motherfucker!

  Fuck you.

  Why ignite Providence to open my heart if you

  knew I would suffer?

  Why take me on a magic carpet ride only to pull

  the carpet out from under me?

  Why? Why? Why? Why?

  Surely you knew it was impossible. Surely you saw

  this coming from a thousand galaxies away!

  You brought me a love beyond my wildest

  imaginings. For what purpose if we couldn’t be

  together?

  Why make me whole and then rip me to shreds?

  Why this cruel joke?

  APOLOGIZE! APOLOGIZE!

  Finally I have the willingness to open, and my

  beloved is an escapist!

  What an insidious set up.

  You sadistic shit.

  I hate you God.

  Like a man made mad by rejection, I printed the letter and taped it face up on my skylight so that God would be sure to read it. Fucker, I want answers!

  Before I went to bed that night, I wrote “fuck you!” on Sarah’s favorite mirror, using the cherry blossom lipstick she left behind. Clearly I wasn’t ready to look inside for the answers. I needed to be a victim just a little while longer.

  Armor Up!

  The next morning, Sarah called. Had she felt me looking back at us in the rear-view mirror? Was she also looking back through hers? She was sobbing terribly. Soon I was too. The loss of the beloved cuts the deepest vein.

  “I don’t know if I can live without you, Ogdo. I feel so lost. All my old ways of bouncing back are failing me.”

  “Yah, mine too. It’s a whole different planet. We’re not the same people now.”

  “No, we aren’t. What do we do about it?” she asked, almost hysterical.

  “We work on it,” I replied. “Work on what’s obstructing us.”

  “No, Ogdo. I don’t want to work on it. I just want to love you.”

  “Then come back here and love me,” I urged, forgetting we already tried that.

  She said nothing for a long time. Then, very quietly, she spoke, “I can’t. I know I can’t do this. I can’t work on this. I don’t want to open those doors again.”

  I spent the next two hours trying to convince her to make a commitment to couples counseling. She refused. I re-fused. It got me nowhere. Just as it had gotten any woman who ever tried to persuade me to join them in therapy nowhere, until I was ready.

  Whatever assumptions I had made about gender availability were officially turned upside-down with Sarah. No matter what anyone tells you, the flight from love is not gender specific. It’s not always the men who won’t do the work. Fear is fear. Sometimes the woman is the one sprinting away when the truth hits the fan. Great love is the great equalizer. Its terrors don’t discriminate between the genders. It frightens most everyone who walks through its all-consuming door.

  After we got off the phone, I went upstairs and punched the futon hard. Fuck feeling again! Where’s my no-pain body? I yelled at God again. What the fuck!!*#&&%^&*%#*!! I so wished I could fall out of love. Just for a day, an hour, even a minute, give me a momentary respite from this longing. It’s so much easier to let go when the love connection is of a practical nature. When it stops serving its purpose, we stop longing for it. It’s damn near impossible to let go when the love is emanating from the soul, because it never stops calling to us. Damn!

  Isn’t there a pre-nup we can sign against pain?

  The darkness deepened as the pain of loss moved through my inner world like a devilish fog. Soon every crevice was filled with doom, as I couldn’t begin to imagine anything worth living for. It was my childhood all over again, only this time I really was homeless: my home had up and left me. For weeks I went through the motions everywhere, barely managing to deal with the practical world before collapsing into heartache in the evening. It had taken all my courage to surrender to the unknown, and now my worst fears were realized. No realms made any sense to me now—not the exhilarating love universe I ha
d entered, nor the pragmatic world I had abandoned. And the unknown was a storehouse of suffering.

  I embarked on a self-numbing rampage. First, I raced back to my law practice, largely in an effort to close off my heart. It worked. Soon the armor began to form around my vulnerability. I witnessed it while it was happening—the return of my hyper-vigilance, the re-emergence of my pseudo-machismo, and the shallowing of my breath in an effort to dampen the pain. A return to the invulnerable form that had protected me as a traumatized child. Back then, closing my heart may very well have meant the difference between life and death. This moment felt no different.

  At the same time, I went right back to my head-tripping ways. It seemed to be a synonymous process—turn off the heart and turn on the monkey mind. With an obstructed energetic flow in the body itself, the energy has nowhere to go but up. I found myself trying to figure out Sarah’s actions with conceptual, repetitive thinking. Not how I felt about what happened, but what did I think about what happened? A losing proposition—the path of the egghead.

  Then, I turned to food. No better way to stuff down grief! Over the next months, I sought out one culinary comfort after another in a desperate quest for relief. I began with sweets—ice cream and chocolate—and then graduated to heavy and depleting foods—pasta and fried chicken wings—in a relentless effort to keep myself so tired that I couldn’t feel a thing. The more pain I felt, the more food I ate, until I had gained nearly twenty pounds in ten weeks. It was ugly. My buttons were popping. Now I too was a cold mess.

  I was willfully determined to neglect my body, depriving it of anything that would nurture the flow of feeling. I stopped walking. I stopped getting massage. I unconsciously blocked every pathway of release, ensuring there was no fluidity anywhere in my body. With the river all dammed up, very few feelings got to the surface. It’s amazing how many systems need to cooperate in order to shut down our feelings and close the heart. You have to shallow the breath, tighten the musculature, cerebralize the moment, and bury your emotions. It’s like a perverse game of twister, contorting your entire being away from the heart. It takes a lot of energy to deaden our aliveness.