by Chris Grosso
Paul Brunton, a student of Ramana Maharishi (whom Michael Taft mentioned in the previous chapter regarding nondualism), wrote an amazing book called The Short Path to Enlightenment. When I read that title, I was turned off because I thought he meant he had a shortcut to enlightenment, but that isn’t what the book is about at all. Brunton distinguishes between the long path and the short path to enlightenment. The long path is what most “spiritual seekers” take, doing the same practices day in and day out and risking getting stuck. The time spent on the long path is not for nothing, though. It does its work of grinding away whatever it is that we need ground away, like sifting through the root causes of our depression or feelings of low self-esteem. Brunton maintains, however, that these practices are still ego practices, and one cannot see through the illusion of being a separate self from the place of an ego. As Brunton wrote:
The end of all his efforts on the Long Path will be the discovery that although the ego can be refined, thinned, and disciplined, it will still remain highly rarefied and extremely subtle. The disciplining of the self can go on and on and on. There will be no end to it. For the ego will always be able to find ways to keep the aspirant busy in self-improvement, thus blinding him to the fact that the self is still there behind all his improvements. For why should the ego kill itself? Yet the enlightenment which is the goal he strives to reach can never be obtained unless the ego ceases to bar the way to it. At this discovery he will have no alternative to, and will be quite ready for, the Short Path.1
Hence, the short path to enlightenment, which Brunton says is self-inquiry. For my own purposes, I describe this as the practice of direct looking, where I see beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything I’m looking for is right here, right now, and all that is left is the direct seeing of this wisdom, soul, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not even “me” seeing at this point. It’s the see-er, the seeing, and the seen experienced as one, because at that point, ladies and gentlemen, “Chris” has left the building. When I allow my mind to get in the way, I lose the connection. Especially in times when we’re repeating destructive behavior, it’s important to scrape away all the stuff—the self-loathing, anger, fear—and see our true selves. When we can, we see a glimmer of light on the path out of whatever our situation happens to be.
Sera calls that place the “soul realm,” and then she said something that I found to be so fucking beautiful: “The soul realms don’t make a lot of sense, but they make a lot of love.” Imagine having that understanding, that truth in your heart, when you’re beating yourself up for falling off the wagon or perhaps yelling at a loved one?
Sera took it deeper. “I’ve had so many experiences with my soul when I’m in that space, when nothing feels more honest or natural or true for me, but when I come out of it in some way—a car might honk at me, or I’ve gotten into an argument or stepped into the collective consciousness of this planet—and suddenly I doubt what I experienced, because it doesn’t make sense. Or it doesn’t fit into the spiritual status quo or the social mores or whatever we want to call it. Self-doubt has been a big part of my path.” Man, I loved that: Self-doubt has been a big part of my path. It’s the not-knowing as much as—if not more than—the knowing that gets us to the truth we seek.
As she broke it down, Sera said, “Being able to look at how I feel instead of what I think about my experience brings me more into my skin, my body, and my humanity. It opens my heart, even if it’s excruciating and painful. I trust what I see in the soul realms. No matter how crazy it might sound to my external ears, my inner ears know when they’re hearing the truth. Sifting through and coming up against everything else is a part of the practice.”
That’s a fundamental belief Sera and I have in common: You’ve got to find the answer for yourself. Spiritual teachers, friends, mentors, therapists, or experts can be wonderful guides, but at the end of the day, they can give you only their answers, not your own. Ruthlessly test and question everything in your experience and find out directly what is and what is not true. Do this unapologetically, which is not easy—it’s something I still struggle with. If you step onto this path of direct experience and are sincerely walking it, you’re going to experience some crazy shit, but also some miraculous shit. These truths, these direct experiences are undeniable, and being apologetic when talking about them is such a disservice. This, again, has been one of my struggles—I don’t intentionally want to offend anyone, and I don’t like confrontation. On top of that, when I’m giving a talk or a workshop, particularly with younger people, I picture my younger self listening and reacting to what I’m saying: “This fucking guy is nuts, talking about compassion and loving-kindness. And nonduality? How is he not institutionalized right now?” Maybe I wouldn’t have been that harsh, but I also wouldn’t have been very receptive, either. Yet I appreciate the skeptical attitude many people have toward the whole “spirituality” thing, because there is so much bullshit that comes along with it. It’s a fine line to walk.
Sera helped me see another side of this. “I spent much of my life embarrassed by my spiritual passion and my own experiences. Those times when we walk around feeling, sensing what’s happening beneath the layers. Or when something opens our heart in a way that makes us feel God or the universe or life coursing through everything. And then looking around and seeing everyone in that moment, buried in their cell phone, or jaded and angry. There can be a sense of embarrassment and apologies.” Something shifted for Sera when leadership coach Robert Rabbin, who teaches the Speaking Truthfully workshops, heard one of Sera’s talks. She suffers terribly from stage fright, and she shared this with her audience. Afterward, Rabbin called Sera and said, “You need to stop apologizing for who you are.” Even though she didn’t use those exact words in her talk, he picked up on her message of “sorry I’m like this” as she spoke. “It was a good wake-up call for me. I can’t say I’m completely over the stage fright, but it was something that shook me enough to look at why I’m so apologetic and ask myself why I’m embarrassed about my own truth.”
Being comfortable in our truth, not to mention our own skin, is something I consider to be a huge act of bravery. In my own experience, I’ve found so many spiritual teachings and practices to help with this, from loving-kindness meditation to mantra repetition to basic, bare-bones mindfulness breathing. I’ll say it again: There is so much bullshit out there that’s labeled “spiritual.” I understand that there is no right or wrong way, but I wanted Sera’s perspective. If there’s no right or wrong, what is authentic spirituality and how do we connect with a true spiritual practice?
“Authentic spirituality,” according to Sera, “often has an organic quality to it. It feels simple and natural, even if some of the practices can seem a little complex. I often say—because this is my own experience—when I am connected to my soul or when I feel connected to the souls of others or the soul of this planet or the soul of this universe, it predates religion or any techniques or methods or teachers. It predates that shit. It’s life living itself. It’s a beautiful combination of very wild and natural. It sounds so simple, but the way the human and the Divine crash and crunch into each other—the awkwardness and the grace of that—to me looks and feels authentic. It’s not someone trying to be spiritual. And it’s not someone who thinks he is only a meat robot. It’s someone who understands and is wrestling with and inviting that crazy experience of being both human and Divine.
“That’s why authentic spirituality is without pretense. It’s not trying to cover anything; it’s trying to reveal. It’s not trying to be something it’s not, whether that means trying to be better than it is or even worse than it is. I can gauge this by the way it makes my body feel. If something opens me and grounds me and allows my feminine body to be what it needs to be and do what it needs to do, that’s an indicator to me. Humor is also a good indicator to me. But most of it is something I can’t express in words. It’s a pinpoint that comes from our heart that we all know when we’ve hit it, wh
en we see it outside of us, when we’re experiencing it as ourselves. We know when it’s real—Real with a capital R. It’s a huge relief.”
That’s something I love about Sera’s work—that she’s not afraid to go into the messiness of this human experience. Many people step onto the spiritual path because they want to avoid those experiences—the pain and heartbreak—but little do they know that if they’re being real about their practice, in many cases it will serve to intensify the messiness of being human, at least for a little while. The grace and the grit are two sides of the same coin. Life can fucking suck sometimes. Take, for example, that right now people we love are perhaps sick or dying, or just lost a job or had their heart broken. On the other side of that, perhaps people we love just beat cancer or gave birth to a healthy baby or got a promotion at work or got married to their soul mate. There are two sides of the same coin called life.
Sera showed me that that’s why we need to create our own spiritual space. It can be meditation or singing or anything that returns us to our own bodies, calms down our nervous system, and allows us to stand in the world and embrace it. “Not float above it, not try to deny it, not turn away or cloud it with spiritual incense, but walk right into it. Any practice that helps us do that would fall into the category of authentic spirituality. What I love about my own experience and my own soul is that she shoves me back down into my body. She’s doesn’t allow me to escape or close my eyes. She allows me to rest, relax, and recharge, but she’s not interested in my avoiding things. She’s interested in my learning how to feel again. That’s one of the trickiest parts of becoming human. It’s been a huge part of my path, learning how to be okay with being human while also being Divine at the same time. For many of us, it’s almost an innate embarrassment that we’re both. It’s a challenge to bring those together in a way that keeps us fully here—really, really here—while also remembering we have constant, twenty-four-hour access to Divine love, to universal support, to life itself. Anything that tips the scale to one side or the other for too long doesn’t feel healthy.”
That made me think of a saying I love: “We are spiritual beings having a human experience, but we are also human beings having a spiritual experience. They are indistinguishable.” In response to that saying, what did Sera think it meant to accept ourselves fully in all our perfect human imperfections; to take an honest, fearless look at our naked selves and stay there, acknowledging both the frailty and the glory in the same glance?
“Quite honestly, that’s the reason I’m here—to do that. It’s something I’ve wrestled with—how to fully accept every aspect of me, or at least the aspects that I’m aware of, and even the ones that I’m not as aware of but can still feel banging around. I don’t want to overspiritualize it, but acceptance—total self-acceptance—means we’re accepting the parts of us that are very difficult—our shadows, wounds, addictions, pains, jealousies—while simultaneously accepting that we are Divine. How to accept both of those is the biggest revolution we can create, both in our own lives and on this planet. It’s something we hear everywhere in the spiritual world and the self-help world: Accept yourself. It’s repeated all the time, and as is true with any spiritual platitudes or clichés, we can ignore it or even have some practice around it, but the real profound belly of that feels much bigger. The very reason I came here, the very reason I incarnated as a soul, was to experience both—the Divine and the human. Once we experience it, we can accept, and once we can accept, we can love.”
I dug that. It made me think about how I had no problem accepting the shitty aspects of who I was for so many years—the worthless addict or the fat loser—but how it was almost impossible to accept and embrace anything good. Noah Levine (whom I’ll introduce you to later in this book) once said something very interesting to me: “People don’t always relapse because their lives are shitty, but sometimes because they’re going well and a part of them doesn’t feel worthy or know how to live with goodness.” That fundamental human struggle was something I could relate to. It’s underneath almost everything we do. How could we use those times of unworthiness, our difficult life experiences, and the struggles we face as catalysts toward spiritual awakening?
Sera affirmed what many spiritual teachers and traditions have taught—that it’s about changing perspectives on that experience—but she put her own spin on it. “I don’t think it means that you have to stay in only one perspective, like a spiritual perspective on every single shitty experience. I do think it means developing the flexibility to look through several different lenses at what is happening or has happened to us, to someone else, to the world in general, that feels difficult to deal with.
“What I call soul work, which for me is equivalent to organic spirituality, is about feeling the difficulty of the situation that I am in or that I was in or that someone else was in—fully feel it. That can take some time. If I allow myself to go into the difficulty and the pain, and I’m in a safe enough space to do that—and sometimes that might require having outside help to hold the space for me—it’s a natural portal or pathway to the bigger perspective. The bigger perspective overlaps with my human perspective, it doesn’t override it; it expands it and says, ‘Yeah, this is shitty as fuck and hurts like hell, and is there some deeper reason—not reasoning from the mind, but from the heart—for why this is happening?’ I’m looking for an answer that comes from a place that knows only love. I’m not talking about ‘love and light.’ I’m talking about the love that gets in the dark mud and rolls up its sleeves and embraces bloody bodies. This is the love that can hold a difficulty I’m experiencing and match it in a way that my mind and human perspective can’t.
“Sometimes, depending on the work I do with my soul, it’s an exchange between me and my soul, and that can be powerful, too. I can get a dialogue going about how this has happened and what I as a soul might be attempting to learn through this experience. I must always be careful with that when I’m talking about it, because again, I’m not trying to turn it into some New Age thing. I do know that when I’m hearing from my Soul (with a capital S) why she might want to experience some of the most horrific things you can think of experiencing, it doesn’t float me above them, it sinks me into the heart of them in a way that allows me to be there and allows all of it to briefly be okay. It doesn’t mean I don’t still have to get active and change things and do my best to help things outside of me and any injustice in the world, but it helps me know that there is also something behind this that is much bigger than what I can imagine or what I can project onto it.”
She was talking about holding space, or having others hold space for us when we can’t, which is important. When I went through my relapse, one of the big problems was that I was horrible at reaching out to others for help. I learned through that experience that it was truly something I needed to change. In the twelve-step programs, participants say we recover, and I dig that because it’s implied we don’t do it alone. Unfortunately I was really bad at connecting with any support networks, let alone with friends in general. It goes back to the introvert thing. I realized I needed to get the fuck over myself, because had I been in regular communication with some support system, there was a significantly better chance that I wouldn’t have ended up relapsing. But I did, and I’ve used that experience to light a fire under my ass in many different areas of my life, but especially when it comes to talking with others and sharing my pain. Sometimes we don’t have access to friends, family, or support networks, and we are on our own. During those times, how do we learn to create an open space for healing ourselves?
Sera saw this as a case-by-case situation. She suggested asking ourselves questions like “ ‘What makes me feel safe?’ ‘What makes me feel held?’ ‘What do I need in this moment to feel like I can feel this feeling and have this experience as it is?’ It might be something like needing to be around flowers. Or the ocean. Or on the beach or in the neighborhood park or next to that tree. I can feel it when I lean up against a t
ree—it’s enough of a presence, a sense of support that I can grieve or feel the anger or begin to process whatever I’m going through. What it is for each of us is a question we need to ask, and the answer might change depending on the circumstances.
“Cultivating that awareness of what holds us is huge. So is trusting. I know I’m a little bit rebellious. I’ve never had a formal teacher. I’ve never been a part of a recognized tradition or lineage. I’ve never even had a so-called traditional practice in some ways. In other ways, I probably have a very traditional practice. I firmly believe, based on my own experience, and based on working with people and looking out at life, that we can hold ourselves and create an environment that can help hold us. We have everything that it takes to cultivate and explore our inner terrain. When we can be honest about that, then we can say, ‘Yeah, I’ve created the right space, there are candles, there are flowers, maybe I took a bath, but I’m still feeling uneasy, so I’m going to call my dear friend.’ Or ‘I’m going to wait and try to find somebody on Skype who I can talk to who will sit there and hold the space for me.’ All of that, to me, is part of it. I will always go back to how I know that the soul is the ‘us’ of us, and we are here for ourselves. We know how to move through this, but a lot of the time it’s about reestablishing that trust, remembering how to do that, and allowing it to happen naturally instead of in a forced or prescribed way.”