An Uncommon Bond

by jeff brown

  And then a blessing walked through the door. An old girlfriend contacted me after many years. Tracy was someone I always enjoyed spending time with. There was no profound attraction, but there was a real sense of acceptance between us.

  She knew that Sarah and I had parted, so she offered to come over to cook me dinner. When she arrived, she hugged me warmly, just as she always had.

  “You look worn. You’ve been to hell and back. Let me feed you.” She brought me to the couch, covered me with a blanket, and made us the best mango salmon dinner imaginable. It felt good to have a woman in my space, particularly one who wasn’t fazed by my dirty dishes and unkempt appearance.

  After we ate, she curled up beside me on the couch to cuddle. It felt perfectly comfortable, as my sense of isolation evaporated in her arms. And, much to my surprise, I began to feel sexual charge, something I hadn’t felt in months. We kissed and built energy in front of the fire for hours. It was very sweet.

  She took my hand and led me up the stairs to the bedroom. The room was dark, and we both undressed before jumping under the covers. The kissing intensified as we touched each other’s bodies. I so needed to feel pleasure again. I worked my way down to her yoni, my mouth eager to taste her. And then I froze, as the contrast between the love I felt for Sarah and the way I felt about Tracy became too much to bear. I was overcome with memories of Sarah—on her back, in the shower, moving perfectly beneath me on a resplendent wave of love. She was so close, I could almost taste her.

  I rested my head on Tracy’s belly, and sobbed like a baby for hours. Kind soul that she was, she comforted me until I fell asleep.

  It was clear—there is no better way to summon the pain of loss than trying to sleep with someone that you don’t love, too soon after losing the one that you do. I was almost better off alone than risking the reminder of what had been lost. It was proving to be one of life’s greatest challenges to go from intimacy with my beloved to intimacy with a mere mortal. Of course, the beloved is surely mortal, but the contrast between soul-sourced intimacy and attraction-driven intimacy was startling after I had touched God with love’s fingers. My sexual body had become indistinguishable from the divine and longed to remain united. Separating them again felt like a kind of suicide, a desecration of my innermost holiness. Better to have the memory of one beloved, than the presence of a thousand sexy im-posters.

  Dudin’ Fantastic

  I woke up the next morning feeling lighter and more open. Months of frozen pain had melted and moved through me, momentarily deepening my presence. I felt a sliver of readiness to understand what I had been through. Sarah and I had been adventurers, traveling the yoniverse on our magic carpet. Now a new adventure had begun—the journey of making sense of it all.

  Where to begin? I sensed that Dude was right. There was gold in the heart of the dross. But how to uncover it?

  My mind took over. I spent weeks contemplating and analyzing the relationship with Sarah, with no clarity. Frustrated, I found myself turning to positive thinking techniques, Krishna McMaster style. And, for a brief time, they were super effective. I suddenly felt grateful for the experience, certain I had forgiven Sarah, convinced I had transformed my suffering into understanding.

  Then, Dude caught me. He spotted me sitting at a table in the window of my favorite Thai restaurant, happily slurping down my favorite dish—a yummy bowl of Pad Woon Sen. In he came, dressed in the baggiest overalls I had ever seen with a silky red turtleneck beneath. What a character.

  Dude looked hungry. I motioned for him to sit down.

  “How you dudin’?” he asked.

  “Dudin’ fantastic, Dude. Feeling a lot better.”

  “You are, are you?” he asked, like a guy who knew something I didn’t.

  “Yah, I’m feeling grateful for all that was.”

  “And the love?”

  “I’m grateful for the love, even though it didn’t last. I’m just lucky to have experienced such love in this lifetime.”

  “Really? That was a quick healing for such a great loss.”

  “I’m a fast healer when I put my mind to it.”

  “Oh ya. Good ole’ mind. That’ll do it, eh? And what does your heart have to say about that?”

  “My heart... my heart says: it’s all good. The love, the pain, the loss—all good, all God. No difference,” I quickly replied.

  He was annoying me. I motioned for the waitress to come over. She took Dude’s order. While we were waiting for it to arrive, Dude started in on me, “You’re lying to yourself, buddy.”

  “It’s okay, Dude, you don’t have to dish out any wisdom tonight. I’m happy to feed you for free.”

  “Oh, thank you, but you see, I can tell… I see it all the time… premature healing. It will leave you the worst kind of broken. Broken with a bullshit smile on your face.”

  Irritated, I sat in silence for some time, hoping he would get the message.

  “Better hurt than hardened, kid. Look, you can’t heal if you don’t go deep into the pain.”

  “I know, man, I went in fucking deep...”

  “Oh yah... how fucking deep did you go?”

  “I grieved hard. Really, really hard,” I insisted.

  “Did you almost die?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then you didn’t grieve hard enough.”

  Shit. Who needs a therapist when you have Dude?

  Then he looked straight at me and said with firmness, “You have to truly grieve her. Then, you have to let her go.”

  “I have. I know she’s not coming back.”

  “Knowing it and letting go are entirely different things. Look, repressed emotions are unactualized spiritual lessons. You have to go all the way through the emotional stages before you can see the gift. Going halfway leaves you halfway between the worlds. That’s a shit-ty place to be. What people don’t realize is that there’s no difference between their emotional and their spiritual life.” He pointed to the world around us and said, “This is all the school of heart knocks. The deeper you go, the more you grow.”

  Oh no, not more metaphors. But I sensed he was right.

  Ugh, Dude.

  “Okay, but how do I keep from getting trapped there and never graduating?”

  “Look, I told you before—you can’t heal your heart with your mind. You can only heal your heart with your heart. You got to go all the way through the process. Feel the heartbreak and the anger; feel all of your feelings to their very core.”

  “For how long?”

  “As long as it takes. The feelings will only hurt until they convert into the lessons at their heart. Feel them until you can feel them no more.”

  He was silent for a moment, before speaking up again. “And that also means don’t be doing that artificial forgiveness trip people do. You can’t forgive her this fast! Most people just fool themselves into thinking they have forgiven when all they have done is tucked their feelings away. Covered them over. Forgiveness is over-rated, bud. Healing first, forgiveness later! And don’t be doing that bullshit spiritual story re-frame either: the ‘it’s all good, it’s all God’ bullshit. I tried that for years—it doesn’t work. This is not just some story that you can re-write whenever it feels uncomfortable. This is your life, man!”

  The waitress brought over his noodles and he slurped them down rapidly. Dude really was hungry.

  “Slow day on the street. Thanks for feeding me,” he said as he got up to leave.

  “My pleasure. Thanks for bringing me back to earth,” I sighed in resignation.

  “Sure. It’s better down here.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  16

  Dead Path

  Maybe Dude was right. Maybe I hadn’t truly grieved her absence. I knew I hadn’t truly let her go. But how does one let go of their beloved? How does one extricate themselves from their very breath? Where does one live after their soul-home has been demolished? How does one return to aloneness after swimming in the sea of on
eness? How many more fucking metaphors for the same tortured memories?

  Oh Sarah.

  I wish I could say that this was a co-dependency issue, but it was so much more than that. It was entirely existential. Reality had taken on a whole new meaning in the heart of this love experience. Where to find meaning now? If my life’s purpose isn’t to love my beloved, then why on earth am I here?

  Bewildered, I went back into my head to find my answers. No luck. Dude was right again: excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis. I briefly returned to therapy. No luck there, either. I just talked around the issues. I created space in my work week to process the feelings, but found it difficult to go deep in my daily life. My trial law practice was growing fast and it was increasingly more difficult to extricate myself from the masks that I wore in the courtroom. Vulnerability and armor make strange bedfellows. And perhaps most difficult of all was trying to let go of Sarah in the apartment we had shared. The scent of my lost beloved was everywhere.

  And then she called one day at the beginning of spring. It had been a long time since I had last heard from her.

  “I want to say goodbye, Lowen.”

  “You already did, loud and clear. Where you going now?” I asked, afraid to hear her answer.

  “I’m just taking the car. Gonna drive to Austin, Texas, to start over,” she said softly, as though some part of her knew it was avoidant.

  “You could drive to Canada...” I said, immediately hooked back into my longing.

  “No, honey, I can’t. I need to start over…”

  “You’re just running…”

  She hung up the phone.

  Lightnin’ Foot in action. Fuck.

  I fell to the couch in an excruciating mess, lying there for hours in my tiresome hopelessness. Lightnin came over to comfort me and just made it worse. The last thing I needed was a reminder of Sarah. There was something about this hang up that felt almost worse than the betrayal. As soon as I heard the dial tone, I knew she wasn’t coming back. My delusions and fantasies were exposed. This was the real deal. There was nowhere to go from here. This was a dead path.

  I could hear myself say it, again and again…

  This is a dead path. This is a dead path. This is a dead path.

  As I said it with more conviction—for the first time, I began to believe it.

  Shame Shackles

  When I got back on my feet, I plunged to a place so dark, so barren, that I began to consider suicide as a means of escape. The hope of death felt better than the death of hope. Perhaps the way out of this crushing darkness is absolute darkness, itself.

  Oddly metabolized grief became my earnest companion as I fumbled through my days pained and confused. When I wasn’t working, I was back to hiding in the house, reluctant to connect with a world that had nothing to offer me. I lay there on the couch, spun out on my victimhood, waiting for the cosmic guillotine to sever me whole. I hated everything, most of all myself.

  One day, the pain leeched out in the heart of a trial. I was defending a man charged with sexual improprieties, when I broke from tradition and attacked his female accuser on the witness stand. Until now, I had become known for my subtle cross-examinations in sexual assault trials. But not today. This time I wanted blood—Sarah’s blood.

  “And your history didn’t include seducing men as an act of revenge?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s not the feeling I get from you. You feel like a woman who knows how to get what you want with your body,” I snarled accusingly.

  I went after the witness all afternoon—so nasty that the trial judge had to rein me in on numerous occasions. And then we lost the trial, a trial I could easily have won. Sarah had defeated me yet again.

  That night, the intensity of my desperation escalated. On the way back from court, I stopped in at a bar I used to go to when I was in law school. I got a table in the corner and ordered some gin. After about an hour, I became uproariously drunk, almost to the point of collapse. Fuck love—booze was my path home.

  I left the bar and took a taxi to Lake Ontario. I needed something vast to swallow my pain. I stumbled along the boardwalk until dizziness landed me on my ass on the beach. I surrendered to it, lying down on my back looking up. The night was dark and ominous, as heavy clouds cloaked the full moon. I scanned the entire sky for a little bit of light, but none could be found. Closing my eyes, looking inside, no light there either. Something worse than madness—complete and utter existential hopelessness. A soular eclipse of the heart.

  It had all come down to one fundamental question: What is life without love?

  Before her, I could ride on the hope that one day it would come. After her, there was nothing left to hope for. No light of understanding, no reason to believe, nothing. I had tasted the sweet fruits of divinity and then was cruelly banished from the garden. Perhaps my parents were right all along—I’m not welcome on mother earth.

  I fell asleep on the beach and awoke to the glaring sun. For a moment I was disoriented and confused. My darkened soul didn’t know what to do with the light. I walked up to Lakeshore Blvd., and waited an hour for a taxi to take me back to my crypt. When we arrived, I realized I had neither money, nor keys. They must have fallen out of my pocket onto the beach. I woke my neighbor at 7:30 to borrow the $25 I needed to avoid a criminal charge. After the driver left, I broke in through my back door. Sleep came easily, until the abandonment wound woke me up with a screeching howl. Again, you would think that our worst wounds would go to sleep along with us, especially when we are most overcome with hopelessness. But not a chance. The little bastards never miss a pity party.

  The nightmare related to my mother. I was catapulted back in time to an early childhood episode that never left me, often returning to haunt me during difficult times. I was five years old and my mother was standing at the foot of my childhood bed, reminding me I was unworthy: “You worthless little brat. You’ll never amount to anything. Me and your Father wanted a daughter—not you! You were just a mistake!” I heard her shrill voice cutting through me, determinedly imprinting her shaming mantras in my cells. I lay there, frozen in time, unable to defend myself, taking in her demeaning message as true. She was my mother after all.

  Given the weight of my shame shackles, it’s little wonder I had spent so much time alone in my life. Imprisoned by self-hatred, the bad boy’s sentence was to wander the cosmos alone, forever prohibited from connecting to anything nourishing outside himself. A separate universe felt both safer and the limit of his entitlement.

  I then began a campaign of self-hatred that lasted for months. I had never cared for serious drugs, but they now became my bypass of choice, as I finally took the cocaine plunge. If I couldn’t find ecstasy with a woman, I was going to find it with a substance. I snorted some every evening with my tacos and spent weekends lying on my couch in yet another ecstatic nightmare. Why do we turn against ourselves when we most need to give ourselves comfort? What will it take before we learn how to hold ourselves in our own arms?

  One night, it all came to a head, as I found myself struggling to breathe in the middle of the night. When I finally got to my feet to call an ambulance, I threw up all over the bed. And the floor. And the hallway that led to the bathroom. On my way through the door, I looked up to see Sarah staring down at me from the ceiling. How did she get up there?

  I couldn’t make it to the toilet, preferring to make the tiles my home instead. I lay on the cold floor, looking up at my beloved, speaking to her in tongues. Now and then I threw up still more, before returning to my disoriented soliloquy.

  After running out of steam, I fell asleep on the floor. When my eyes reopened, half my face crusted in vomit, I looked back up at the ceiling. Sarah was gone. Staring at the empty ceiling, I felt into the pain that enveloped my heart. It was like an unending tsunami, a torrent of torment that transcends time. Oh Goddess. You have left so much pain in your oceanic wake. Do you know? Really, w
as there no other way? Harshly severed from the breastmilk of eternity, what on this earth will nourish me now?

  Lying there, I knew I had shifted from self-distraction to self-destruction. I was now in a full-blown life-and-death struggle. I was intimately aware of the decision before me: close down and die, or open up and live. If I continued to avoid my pain, it would surely kill me, one way or the other. As desperate as I was to not feel the pain, I wanted to die just a little less. I somehow knew that dying in this condition would ultimately provide no relief anyway—my soul would wander heaven’s corridors for all eternity, searching for Sarah. I had to find a way to stay here.

  It was time for something to change.

  Do, or die.

  17

  The Trembling Hand of God

  The next morning, I made a spontaneous decision to go away. I couldn’t shift this self-destructive pattern in this house of pain. I telephoned my colleague and begged him to manage my cases for the next two weeks. Exhausted by my shenanigans, he agreed, in exchange for a promise to resolve this situation once and for all. I went online and hunted for a healing center far from home. Scanning through dozens, I kept coming back to Rockwood Hot Springs, a clothing optional retreat center near Sedona, Arizona. I had been there once before for an empowerment weekend and had the strangest, strongest feeling there was something waiting there for me. If anyone needed to bare his naked truth, it was me.

  I flew to Phoenix the following Friday. As the rental car snaked through the mountains that surrounded Sedona, I experienced tremendous inner conflict. I felt the kind of pressure that builds inside when the soul is longing to expand. I also felt its antithesis, the ever present small-self, clinging yet again to its fear-based lens. It wasn’t going to be easy to die to this dream.

  Pitching my tent up in the hills, I spent the rest of the evening soaking in the Rockwood healing pool with all the other naked seekers. The call to detach rose with a vengeance, inviting me to race back to my warrior urban life... RIGHT NOW. In my imaginings, I left the pool and drove straight to Phoenix airport a hundred times. Yet there was a deeper call, a subtle hint of knowing, that kept me there.