by Chris Grosso
I love everything, love everything I can be aware of.
I just love, just love, just love.
I love from my heart-mind.
Ram Dass taught me that when you can accept love, you can give that love. And that includes love to and from ourselves. “You can give love to all you perceive, all the time. You can be aware of your eyes seeing, your ears hearing, your skin feeling, and your mind producing thought after thought after thought. Thoughts are seductive, but you don’t have to identify with them.” That’s the tricky part—getting unstuck. “You identify not with the thoughts, but with the awareness of the thoughts. To bring loving awareness to everything you turn your awareness to is to be love. This moment is love.
“From that perspective, you can look back at your stuckness and you can love your stuckness, because if you don’t love your stuckness, you bruise your heart, you bruise your soul.” In other words, anything that enters our field of awareness at that point is loved, because it’s experienced from the place of loving awareness.
Back in India, when Ram Dass’s teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, told him to “Love everybody,” Ram Dass replied, “I can’t do it.” Maharajji persisted, saying, “Love everybody,” until Ram Dass grasped that love had to do with the soul and not the ego. This is because “the ego judges, but the soul loves everybody—because everybody is a soul, and a soul loves another soul. It’s not that the small, limited ego ‘I’ loves you, but it’s an unconditional love, because it comes from the ocean of infinite love.”
I wish I could share how it felt to hear these small yet enormous words, how it opened my heart. Honestly, it was almost too much to bear. I’m not over-romanticizing this; I wanted to cry—not tears of sadness, but of joy. What the fuck was going on? I asked Ram Dass if he had any ideas.
He told me I wasn’t the first one to be moved by this practice. He was passing on to me, like he does with all his students and devotees, the experience of love he received from Maharajji. “That love, that feeling of love is something you have wanted and wanted and wanted, and here it is, and you cry and say, ‘I’m crying. I’m feeling at home.’ When you contact your soul from your heart, the emotional heart is activated and it becomes unbearable, the emotion, and you leave the emotion behind and then you go into the soul, and it’s so much. ‘I’m home.’ You feel like you just have to cry. The crying is not sad or happy, it’s just crying. I’m home.”
I think some of that experience for me also comes from the deep-rooted pain I have stored within, because I recognize that a part of me, somewhere deep within my unconscious, doesn’t feel worthy of love, especially after a relapse. How do we learn to realistically change so we can begin to feel worthy of this love?
Ram Dass reminded me that we must love ourselves. The foundation of all healing, of all recovery, of all spiritual work is loving ourselves as souls. The voice in your head that says, “I’ve failed again. I’ll never get it right. I’ve done evil things”—that’s the mind talking. Ram Dass assured me that when you “step back from that and go to the heart, to the soul, you find love, because the soul loves itself, and the soul is what you really are. Not your ego. Your ego is a dream.”
I was digging this, but here was that word again: soul. I know a lot of people have a problem with it—not to mention God. Some people are just cynical, while others have had bad experiences based on their religious upbringing. Ram Dass shined a light on this for me by explaining that the word “soul” has so many meanings because we have so many paths to choose from—Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, agnosticism, and so on. “These paths have different methods. I am an atheist in the sense that I don’t believe in anything, because belief is all in the mind. Belief is not faith. Belief is in the mind; faith is in the heart. I would say, go into your imagination and you can imagine a God, or soul, and feel that love, because everyone wants love—it’s the conceptual mind that keeps us from this love.”
This made me think of an excerpt of a talk from Ram Dass’s website:
There are many stages of the process of transformation.
There is a stage where you feel something in you that is behind your social facade and your social relationships to people. You feel a somebody-ness which we call a soul. You feel yourself as an entity. Then, as you get deeper into the transformative work, that thing starts to dissolve. Then there is no self, there is nobody, there is only one.1
When we spoke, he illuminated this further by saying that “life is one level of consciousness and the soul is one level of consciousness, and the One is another level of consciousness.” By “the One,” he means all of it—the whole shebang. “If you decide to make the journey from your soul to the One, you’re starting the vehicle of your soul. It’s like diving into the ocean. You’re on the shore and you leave your shoes behind and your ‘self’ behind and go diving into the water and become a part of the ocean, yet are still a separate wave. This is a subtle understanding . . . you’ve got to shift perspective.”
Speaking of shifts in perspective, I’d seen a picture of Ram Dass’s puja table—his personal altar—and noticed that along with lots of pictures of Maharajji was one of Donald Trump. It was a great reminder to me to cultivate compassion for everyone—not just the people I feel “deserve” it.
Ram Dass said that Trump is an excellent example. “The only thing we have to work with is his present incarnation, but he’s a soul who has a terrible incarnation this time around. Having compassion in our hearts for that soul, for that incarnation, is another way of looking at it. I have compassion for the soul that has karma that has led to his current incarnation. Poor soul. Poor, poor, poor soul. He’s going to have his comeuppance.”
I wish I shared his equanimity. Fortunately, “The stepping-stones are within each of us. Don’t look outside for gratification, look inside. Inside is your guru, your God, whatever name you’d like to use. Your strength is all your intuition, your voice from within. And if you can’t trust that, where are you? Your strength is not in your thinking mind but rather in your spirit. That has immeasurable strength. You might find yourself in a predicament in your life, and all you have to do is go within, go inside. I had a stroke, which affected my brain. I just went inside to save myself. I have a guru. You have a guru, too. Not in India. It’s a guide, a companion in your life, and he’ll remind you what you are and guide you back inside. You can only find this being within. He comes into your imagination, which is where he’ll meet you. Your imagination is healthy; just go into it.”
There was so much to percolate, to think through. It’s no secret that I’ve struggled with drugs and alcohol in my life, and much of the work I do is with people who’ve suffered in similar ways, with substances, depression, self-harm, and other self-destructive behaviors. I know so many people—myself included—who change their lives for the better for a while, but who then return to these self-destructive patterns, knowing full well that they will not result in anything good.
Ram Dass had a powerful suggestion for how we can protect ourselves from returning to self-defeating behaviors. It was simple and yet perfect:
Stay in the present moment.
In the present moment, we’re not an addict or an alcoholic—that’s our past, even if it was one minute ago, one second ago. That’s why the motto “one day at a time” works. That’s why when I’m asked, “How long have you been clean for?” I respond, “Today.” Relapsing is getting stuck in our past habits and behaviors. Ram Dass cautioned against getting stuck there or even thinking about them too much. “The past is the past. I know that there are traumatic things in the past, but you are a new person every moment. Just now. Just now. Just now. Just now. Ah . . . Addictions are a manifestation from karma. But now, in this moment, you’re a new person. The soul has no addictions except the one addiction to go to God. If you’ve gotten into your soul, you are free of addictions. Go into your soul and be free.”
Wow! This utterly fucking resonated and gave me a whole new meaning to �
�Be here now.”
PRACTICE
Be Here Now
Okay, this isn’t an officially licensed or sanctioned meditation, but it will indeed help you to be here now, so in keeping with the spirit of this chapter, I figured why not. This is a two-part, go-to practice I often use when I find myself feeling stressed, anxious, or (insert any other unpleasant human experience here). The beauty is that the practice can be done in as little as one to two minutes (although it certainly can be used for longer if need be).
This practice is a four/seven/eight-breath count that I learned about from Dr. Andrew Weil. It is recommended that you do four rounds twice daily, once upon awakening and once before going to bed. According to Dr. Weil, the practice takes time to have a deep and lasting effect, but “the theory is that by imposing certain rhythms on the breath with your voluntary system, gradually these are induced in the involuntary system. And that comes with time, so it’s the regularity of doing it that counts.”2
That’s not to say that you won’t experience some initial benefits from this practice right away! It’s great for immediate help with stress, anxiety, and panic. It’s also a wonderful way for those who struggle with insomnia to fall (and stay) asleep at night. I speak from experience. The practice is as follows:
• You can do this in any position. Standing, seated, lying down—all are fine.
• Since this is a form of yogic breathing, you’re asked to keep the tip of your tongue touching the ridge of tissue in front of your upper front teeth. It’s said that this completes an energy circuit, but what do I know? I’m just trying to share this as accurately as possible.
• Begin by inhaling through your nose quietly to a count of four (using a count of “one one-thousand, two one-thousand”).
• Next, hold your breath for a count of seven (again using a count of “one one-thousand”).
• Then exhale through your mouth, pursing your lips, for eight counts, making a swoosh noise while doing so.
• After you’ve finished your exhalation, immediately begin the next inhalation, and repeat the cycle four times.
The most important part of this practice is doing it in cycles of four rounds, twice per day (or more throughout the day, if you’d like), while keeping the breath ratio of four/seven/eight as consistent as possible. I believe that’s what Michael Scott would call a “win-win-win.” (If you don’t know who Michael Scott is, please, please, please do yourself a favor and watch season one of The Office right now. Seriously, forget about reading this book and go. It’s streaming on Netflix for your convenience.)
6
THE PLACE WHERE THE SWEETNESS HURTS
CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL TAFT
I first encountered Michael Taft through his website Deconstructing Yourself. As I began reading his articles, they resonated for me—especially his down-to-earth and accessible manner. Next I devoured his books—The Mindful Geek and Nondualism—and I was hooked. I couldn’t wait to speak with him!
Because mindfulness is used in so many contexts, from a way to sell overpriced athleisure wear to a lifelong study of the Satipatthana Sutta, I thought it would be good to start with Michael’s definition. He told me, “Technically, mindfulness is a skill that one has when doing Vipassana Buddhist practice, but for the basic definition, we can say it’s a meditation in which you’re having a moment-by-moment awareness of sensory phenomena, or sensory experience. For example, you’re feeling your feet right now in the present moment, but feeling the sensory experience of having feet—that’s mindfulness meditation. It can apply to any sensory experience, including internal experiences like thinking.
“I’d add that it’s nonjudgmental awareness, because you’re allowing whatever arises to arise without trying to control or change it. Let’s say you’re feeling your feet in the present moment, which is mindfulness meditation, but one foot feels good and the other one hurts. You’re treating those both equally; you’re not trying to ignore the painful one and move toward the pleasurable one or vice versa, necessarily. That’s the basic idea of mindfulness.”
He cautioned me: “We have some misconceptions about mindfulness that come from other forms of meditation. There are two I constantly hear from my students. One is that when you’re mindful, you’re not supposed to have any thoughts, which is not true. The other is that you are supposed to feel only joy, bliss, or peace, or at least total relaxation. That may be true for some forms of concentration meditations, but it’s not true for mindfulness. What’s great about that is that it means you can be mindful even when you’re having an incredibly shitty day, when nothing is pleasant, when nothing is relaxed, when everything is chaotic and intense. You can still pay moment-by-moment attention to that experience nonjudgmentally, and have quite an intense and powerful and fruitful mindfulness meditation.”
This was such an important point. A common misperception is that it’s all love and light—meditation is supposed to be a blissed-out experience. When I was first looking for ways out of drug and alcohol addiction and stumbled onto the meditation path (literally), I was terrible at it. I’d sit there for twenty or thirty minutes of nonstop monkey-mind chatter, barely catching myself to come back to the moment. Gradually I accrued some actual presence, but instead of its becoming nirvana, the floodgates opened and the wreckage of my past started to surface, and I was, like, “Whoa, whoa, what is this bullshit? Where’s the good stuff?” I learned, however, that this is a cathartic and healing part of the practice, even though it feels terrible when it’s happening. Telling it like it is—the raw and ragged truth instead of watered-down and fluffy clouds of promise—doesn’t sell a lot of books, because that’s not what most people want to hear, but they should. Seriously. Especially if they’re looking for genuine healing, not just the five-quick-steps-to-make-everything-perfect, cotton-candy meditation bullshit that’s sold at alarming rates to people when they first start looking.
Michael agreed. “It’s not what we want to hear, but it is often what we need, especially when challenging material comes up that we need to work on. Peace and bliss meditations are best when you’re alone in a silent cave, but if you want to have a practice that changes your life, a practice that you can take into the real world, it must include both positive and negative, pleasant and unpleasant experiences. The peace-and-bliss type of meditation (which I love) is a hothouse flower—you spend months on long, silent retreats to get there. Mindfulness is more industrial, more rubber meets the road, kind of ‘Let’s go take the stuff into the shit, into the trenches,’ and it can be powerful in those situations. I love it for that robust quality it has.”
I liked how he opened mindfulness up. I’ve found that reminding people in workshops I give that when you’re not meditating on Buddha or Christ (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but rather approaching meditation in this way, mindfully with the body, it can be more accessible, especially to the skeptics, which I’m happy to say there’s no shortage of. I mean, think about it—there’s nothing inherently Buddhist or Christian about our bodies or our breath. When we were born, we were born as human beings, and when we practice mindfulness in this way, it becomes a human practice, nothing more and nothing less. This led to another question I had about meditation. In the first chapter of The Mindful Geek, Michael writes: “Can mindfulness meditation truly deliver, or is all this some New Age marketing scam?”1 The New Age marketing scam is something I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking (and writing) about. Does mindfulness meditation work? What’s the deal?
Michael spoke to my concerns. “When we look online, we find many claims made for mindfulness and for meditation. Even when we study some of the research, it sounds like nothing could be that good, right? There are promises that mindfulness can do everything, and although that probably isn’t the case, what’s fascinating is that, with some caveats, mindfulness can do amazing stuff. That’s because it’s such a fundamental skill. Mindfulness works on such a basic level of our minds, such a basic level of our ps
ychologies, that it can affect a lot of different areas of behavior or systems of the brain, leading to a variety of positive effects across the board—things like increased concentration, increased creativity, better connection with other humans, more calm, and the like.”
I know my way around a meditation cushion, and this was all cool and true, but here’s where I found his words getting particularly interesting: “For the most part, especially in the psychological or corporate levels of mindfulness teaching, mindfulness is undersold in a way that’s fascinating. We go out of our way to show that it will calm us down and make us more creative and productive and a better team member and have more emotional empathy and intelligence, but we’re not saying much about how it can fundamentally restructure our understanding of the world and our own lives. We talk a lot about how mindfulness will help people attain their goals, but then we’re not talking a lot about how it will make us reconsider our goals and even who’s having goals in the first place.”
Cool, right? People can see how the practice can help them meet deadlines and reach their goals, but miss how it can help them in their own humanity. Michael likes the idea of change from within the system—and you can’t get more within than corporate America. “That’s a meditation viewpoint: ‘Let’s go in and help transform these corporate cultures, which are such a big part of our lives. Let’s help to change them into something that’s maybe a little more compassionate and thoughtful as well as productive.’ ”
Pairing “meditation” with “corporate” wasn’t Michael’s only unusual juxtaposition. In The Mindful Geek, he focused on meditation as technology. “If we think of technology as a systematized understanding of a subject or area, meditation—and even mindfulness—qualifies as a type of technology. It’s a case of knowing that if you try X and Y, you’ll often get a specific result: Z. That’s the most basic understanding of technology, and meditation fulfills that idea.” Michael was taking a page out of the books of Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, and the cyberpunks by looking at these as technologies. “Things like mindfulness and meditation are ancient brain-hacking technologies that can be used to do some cool, useful, and helpful things. That’s why, in writing a book called The Mindful Geek that’s geared toward people in the STEM—science, technological, engineering, and math—communities, I thought it would be great to use that word ‘technology’ because it gives a different flavor, a different feel for what we’re doing when we’re meditating.”