Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  There’s a mystery to intuition. Lissa gave some amazing examples of people who are protected by their intuition. “Like the woman who’s walking out the door and suddenly gets the ‘Don’t trust the babysitter’ download. Her mind will argue and say, ‘You’re being paranoid. That’s crazy. She comes highly recommended.’ The woman goes back and cancels her plans and finds out the babysitter has a criminal record. Or another woman who got the intuition to check on her baby. The baby’s room was on fire! An electrical wire had sparked this fire.” Lissa has come to think about intuition as a “stealthy way the unseen world communicates with the seen world.”

  The more we quiet our minds through things like meditation and prayer, the more we can recognize the voice of intuition. There have been so many people I’ve spoken with who’ve had glimpses of this and have called it by many different names—Christ consciousness or Buddha Mind, stillness, big Self, or Divine nature. There have been times when I’ve been connected to that intuition, as when I married my ex-wife (a decision I’ll never regret and one for which I’ll forever be immensely grateful). It was an absolute knowing beyond comprehension. Yet more than once I have found myself back in a place where drinking seemed to be the only viable option, in that desperate moment when that switch in my mind flipped to the old Chris who wanted to escape pain and revert to drinking, even though I knew better. I found myself locked in that mental place of fear, of fight or flight, even after having had tastes of the Divine through my spiritual practices and work with meditation and non-dual awareness. If one is in that place of fear, how does one not act out? How can one turn up the volume on their intuition? I wondered if it was even possible.

  Lissa believes it is. “Be aware that you’re triggered. Notice it in your body, notice the fight or flight. Notice what’s happening in your mind. Step into that witness consciousness if possible. Then use that trigger as a cue to pause, get silent, and surrender.” Sometimes it’s as simple as removing yourself from the situation. That’s when she pointed out something fascinating: Sometimes it helps to flee temporarily. Remove yourself from the immediate threat. “Go to the bathroom or outside for a walk and try to calm down. Sometimes it’s fifteen minutes and sometimes it’s an hour, but I do it so I can relax my nervous system, using various techniques.

  “When I’m able to calm my nervous system down a little bit, that’s when I’ll get emotional. I’ll start crying or I’ll feel angry. I’ll notice what’s coming up. I try to do it in silence and breathe through it and then allow myself—and this is a big thing for me—to recognize the part of me that’s triggered. It may be seven-year-old me, so I try holding this seven-year-old the same way I’d hold my daughter. Can I visualize this part of me being held in the benevolent arms of an angel or Jesus or the universe, Mother Earth holding the part of me that’s feeling scared or sad or angry with complete nonjudgment? I let myself comfort myself, and by this point my nervous system has calmed down and I know there’s no tiger. I’m feeling tender. I’ll hold my arms around myself like I’m giving myself a hug. Then I’ll look at what’s happening in my mind. I can’t go straight into the mental inquiry when my nervous system is triggered. I’m in fight or flight. I’m not rational, so there’s no point trying to employ a rational process until I’ve expressed the emotional.”

  Lissa showed me how the process of dealing with triggers can be broken down into three consecutive parts: the physiological, the emotional, and the spiritual inquiry. As was true with Tara Brach’s RAIN, when we reach the point of spiritual inquiry, we can ask, “What is the thought that’s causing me pain right now?” Then we can put the mental inquiry into “Is that a true thought? Is there a way to turn that thought around? Is there a thought that can be truer than this?” That’s often where I get deep insights that take me out of a judging and blaming place and into a place of greater compassion for myself and for whoever or whatever triggered me.

  Lissa has always been very careful not to use this process as some kind of spiritual bypass. Spiritual bypassing is a term I encounter a lot in my work and study, and it’s important to this book. It was coined by Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist John Welwood in the early 1980s and describes a “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”3 I think many of us who’ve had issues with addiction or relapses fall into this. I know I have. We believe our lives can be “fixed,” and in spiritual bypassing we feel that we’ve done that, at least at first. We meditate, pray, do yoga, and whatever else our healing program might prescribe, but instead of digging into our issues, we’re circumventing them and perhaps burying them and allowing them to fester.

  So when it comes to bypassing and triggers, Lissa said, “This doesn’t mean that I don’t then go back to the situation and set a boundary or make a request or attempt to come to an agreement. I see a lot of people using these kinds of techniques as a way of having blind compassion and neurotic tolerance of unacceptable behavior. This is not a technique for tolerating abuse; however, I can come from that place to one of compassion. I can put myself into the other’s shoes. I can find that place of oneness, and then I can return to ‘What do I need to do to protect this human in this dualistic realm?’ What do I need to do to protect this organism? Then I’m able to come back from that with inspired action, an undefended, nonreactive response that comes from a calm, compassionate—albeit fierce—loving place that can say, ‘No, that’s not acceptable.’ ”

  Lissa had more to say about triggers. “I also want to acknowledge that I get very triggered by the self-help industry in general because it sticks needles in people’s ‘not enough’ wounds. We all have ‘not enough’ wounds, so the last thing we need is for people to poke at the spot that we’re always trying to heal, that’s always a little tender. The disclaimer I would like to make is that we’re always looking for a tool we can use so that we never need to go back into a dark place—like, for example, your relapse—but I don’t think it works that way. We’re always looking for how we can control life. When people ask me what the fear cure is, I tell them the name is sort of a misnomer, because it’s about letting fear cure you. If I had to say there is a fear cure, I would say it’s coming into right relationship with uncertainty.”

  Cue the record-scratch sound effect: coming into right relationship with uncertainty. That was something I wanted to know more about, and Lissa did not let me down. “It’s related to control. When we have a painful experience, our minds try to figure out, ‘How can I keep that experience from ever happening again?’ For example, asking, ‘How can I make sure I don’t end up with a bottle in my hand and drinking from it? What can I do to make sure that never happens again?’ But what if that’s impossible? What if there’s nothing we can do to make sure that never happens again? What if there’s nothing we can do to make sure people we love don’t die? We are not in control.”

  I’m going to repeat this statement, because it’s really important in terms of any spiritual process or return to self-damaging behavior, and I think it will strike a nerve for others as well: We. Are. Not. In. Control. Lissa took it further. “Yes, we co-create in the world. Yes, we participate. Yes, we have a Divine spark within us. I like to think of it like I get a vote and God gets a vote, and if we disagree, then God gets the tiebreaker. It’s not that we’re powerless; it’s not that we’re victims.”

  Then Lissa got into something I’d been thinking about a lot as well: the Law of Attraction. If you don’t know what the Law of Attraction is, go online, and you’ll find a ton of stuff, from books to videos—it’s a whole industry. Here’s the short version: a belief that by focusing positive thoughts on something while energetically imagining that you already have that thing, you can manifest it, bring it into being. Lissa notes, “I have a difficult relationship with all the Law of Attraction teachings, but I’ve come to think of it as a sort of spiritual puberty. Maybe one of the early phases is that we b
elieve we are victims of a hostile universe that we can’t control, that we are at the mercy of chaotic forces that do not have our best interests at heart, and that life is terrifying. That’s where so many people in modern culture live. That’s their steady state. If we’re comparing this maturity to adolescence, let’s say that they are eight. And then maybe they turn twelve and realize, ‘Oh my goodness! I can visualize and say affirmations and make wishes and interface with this force and manifest things into reality . . . and I can get what I want!’ It works—some of the time, at least. It’s empowering to read things like ‘dimensionalize a yellow butterfly’ and all of a sudden there are yellow butterflies everywhere and you’re, like, ‘Oh my god! I did that. I am God. I am a creator.’ It’s exciting, except you’re wondering why the Ferrari isn’t showing up. ‘Why can I manifest the butterfly but not the Ferrari?’

  “People grow disillusioned with this Law of Attraction teaching, which says you can have everything you want if you only try harder, visualize more, affirm more, because they’re trying to dimensionalize what their ego wants. There’s a deeper level of spiritual maturity. That’s when you don’t attach to needing to get what your ego wants, because your ego isn’t the wisest part of you. It’s not that you don’t have preferences, but even more than your preferences, you become interested in allowing something larger to guide your life. You’re willing to live in a place of spiritual yielding where all desires become an offering to the Divine as a devotional act.

  “I’ve been very influenced by the teachings of Tosha Silver, who wrote Change Me Prayers: The Hidden Power of Spiritual Surrender. A lot of the spiritual teachings are so patriarchal in their leanings, and I so appreciate the feminine devotional approach she offers. She sees spiritual surrender as an act of love. We can take our desires and our problems and our decisions and all the things the ego perseverates over and we can surrender them to a force of love and ask for help. For example, if I have a desire or something I’m meant to do, one of my regular prayers is to say, ‘Here’s what I’m inclined to do, and if this is motivated toward the highest good, please help me, and if not, please stop me.’ To be genuinely and equally grateful for the cosmic yes as well as the cosmic no is critical. This is not another sneaky way to get what you want. It’s not another way to manipulate the Law of Attraction. As Tosha said, ‘God is not your Costco. God is not your bitch.’ You don’t give God a shopping list and say, ‘Here’s what I want.’

  “The side effect of this way of operating is that it puts the nervous system into relaxation. Think about how many stories you’ve heard of addicts who are in that moment of despair or of people who are on the verge of suicide and something breaks. There’s a level of surrender that is so profound that suddenly it opens a portal for love to rush in. One of the keys to this—and Tosha teaches it in a very lighthearted and sweet way—is saying, ‘Surrender your desire to find a parking spot in San Francisco on a Saturday night to the Divine and wait and see what happens.’ If you’re meant to go to this event, you’ll find a parking spot, and if not, you’re not meant to go. Part of the reason she teaches that is because it develops into a habit. If you’re surrendering your small desires, when it comes to the big and difficult things that the ego is grasping or resisting, then it’s already part of your practice. That practice has helped me to come into right relationship with uncertainty, because then I can relax into it.”

  What Lissa said brought to mind my experience when I was newly married and waiting for my paperwork so that I could live in Canada. I was in a dark place of not knowing anything when it came to untangling the red tape of the application and approval process for residency. The crux of the problem was that I had two old DUIs—felony offenses in Canada—on my record, and for all intents and purposes, immigration probably shouldn’t have allowed me into the country at all. I was at a point of despair and surrender when my caseworker took the time to read my entire file, including the letters of reference I’d included. She said she’d looked online and saw that I was in a place where service was a top priority for me in my life, and because of that she helped me get permission to come into the country.

  “Everything in our culture teaches us to avoid uncertainty at all costs. The unknown is dangerous, but we can reach a place where we stop being afraid and become simply curious about it—a place of wonder. It starts to get exciting, because if we don’t know what the future holds, anything can happen. We can have a spontaneous remission from a seemingly incurable illness. Or Oprah could call. We never know. Tomorrow is a mystery. I look out my window at the beach and think, ‘You know what? I could look out my window and see a band of angels one day. I’ve seen all kinds of curious, awe-inspiring things, but I’ve never seen that, and it would be cool.’ ”

  I laughed to myself when Lissa said this, because it reminded me of my last detox and treatment program, one during which I’d pissed myself because I was so out of it. When I finally came to, I felt like I was dying for real this time—I mean it, I was honestly unsure whether I was going to survive this one, let alone go on to write books about healing. That’s when I met an incredible clinical director at the inpatient program I was in and saw yet again that life is fucking crazy and certainly awe-inspiring at times, but like Lissa said, we must show up so life can show us.

  Lissa continued, “We can reach a place with uncertainty where it almost becomes seductive, which can be a risky phase because we can become reckless, almost as if we’re chasing uncertainty. Anything that feels too much in our comfort zone starts to feel boring, and we’re constantly on the edge, chasing after the next mystical experience or the next extreme sport or the next dangerous relationship. But there’s a phase of spiritual maturity beyond that when we’re not resisting uncertainty and we’re not grasping at uncertainty. That’s when we’re in right relationship with uncertainty—where we’re no longer trying to control life. We’re not trying to get what we want. We’re not trying to resist what we don’t want. We’re in agreement with life.”

  This made me want to chant Lissa’s mantra: “I’m in agreement with life, and I resist nothing.” Although for her, “it was a hard thing to take into my heart and make a practice, because I’d lost five people in six weeks. It’s hard not to resist when you’re in that much grief. And I had a painful romantic breakup. When you’re grieving and you’re heartbroken, there’s that instinctual, limbic part of you that wants to protect you from having to go through that ever again because it hurts so much. I was trained as an OB/GYN, so here’s an apropos example: When a woman is laboring, she is going to have pain, so to resist pain is pointless, and when she resists the contraction, it hurts more. All the midwives and skilled doulas and such know that the coaching is around softening into the pain and relaxing into it, which is counterintuitive, but the more you can relax into the pain, the more you let it sweep through you, the less it hurts.

  “For me, it’s the same thing with emotional pain, heartbreak, or grief. I feel it as a physical contraction of the heart. My heart hurts, but if I don’t resist it, if I don’t have a story that says life should be different than it is right now, then that wave of heart pain can sweep through me, and it usually lasts only the length of a uterine contraction—about ninety seconds. Ironically, that’s about how long a stress response lasts if you don’t attach mental stories to it. There’s something about ninety seconds. If I can let that contraction sweep through my heart, then it passes and I get a reprieve. I may have another contraction, like labor, but over time, the contractions space out, and then they don’t hurt so much.”

  Then Lissa did something that touched me in a profound way—she put this in context of my relapse. “What if there was nothing wrong with your falling off the wagon? Why was this bad? Why make a story that says, ‘I made a mistake, I did something bad’? What if that’s the next phase of your soul’s journey?”

  I was so grateful to her for saying that. I have seen that growth can come from relapse. It showed me a lot of areas I was
stuck in that I wasn’t aware of, but there’s also the part of me that says, “Well, you’re in recovery, and since you fucked up, you’re bad. You should be punished and feel shame and guilt.” And there is some of that, but I can’t deny that relapse was something that happened to me, it was an internal, shitty experience. I didn’t drive drunk or try and fight people in public, but I’ve been carrying a lot of stress and guilt and shame, particularly over how my marriage ended. I guess it’s because of my ingrained belief that relapse is a failure. I did bad, and now I must get back up and start all over again, but I refuse to let that one experience—that twenty-four-hour contraction in my sobriety—define who I am as a person and negate all the hard work I’ve put into my life and my path over the years.

  Lissa reminded me that “taking away the shame and the judgment and almost adding some levity to it makes it such an act of self-love. It’s an act of self-care to be gentle with the part of us that continues to do the things we feel embarrassed or guilty or ashamed about.” At some point in our spiritual maturation, we start caring about ourselves so much that we don’t want the cigarette or the drink or the food. “We really don’t want it. It’s not like we need to beat ourselves into not having the cigarette; we don’t want it because we’ve come into a different kind of relationship with this precious vessel—our body—that holds the spirit with which we’ve developed a relationship. It’s a very gentle, compassionate relationship with the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual self. All those pieces have become integrated, and from that place of integration, the natural impulse to eat better, to drink less, to quit smoking, or whatever becomes a side effect of that tremendous self-tenderness.”