Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  This is one of the ways I identify with Sera. She doesn’t come from a specific background or tradition, and I don’t, either. I’ve had guides, and I’m very grateful for that, but I’ve never been formally initiated in a specific path, and that’s worked for me. I guess you could say the pathless path has been my path. It comes down to direct, undeniable experience.

  Any great teacher will point their student in that direction regardless of the tradition. We each find our own way there, while being brutally honest with ourselves in the process. Like Sera said, the soul will nudge us toward where we need to go, whether it’s to a specific teacher or through a specific life experience. In all fairness, sometimes those life experiences can seem like they’re too much and more than we can handle, like life is shitting on us. That’s certainly what I felt when I found myself time and again back on another fucking detox unit.

  This relates to something I’ve been exploring for a long time, especially in the context of relapse. Why is it so many of us who have the tools, who’ve been in recovery, who’ve been on a spiritual path and worked with mantras, meditation, prayer, yoga, and so forth, don’t use what we know will help us and maybe even save us during difficult times?

  Sera bluntly answered: “Because we’re human!” She acknowledged that an answer to that depends on one’s orientation, be it psychological, behavioral, or spiritual, but essentially it comes down to just being human. “We’re going to be clear and own our shit, and we’re going to get unclear and get fucked by our shit. I don’t feel like that’s supposed to end. We can grow in our ways of handling stuff and being with ourselves through that if we can expand our own love around how our fuckups are part of being human. It doesn’t excuse us. It doesn’t mean that we’re not supposed to do the work around it. But it means that we can let ourselves off the holy hook a little bit.”

  So then is belief in God or considering oneself “spiritual” even necessary to living a spiritual life?

  “No, no, no!” Sera was adamant about this. “I know it’s cliché, but it’s so fucking true that each of us has people in our lives who don’t practice meditation or yoga or read the books or go to church or believe in God, and they are by far the most alive and loving humans some of us have ever met. In fact, having been publicly in America’s spiritual arena for over a decade, I have to say that I am more naturally drawn to the people who don’t necessarily consider themselves to be spiritual. That might be my own shit; it might also be that I’m burned out by some of the spiritual ideals that feel like they chip away at our humanity. What I find myself craving, because this is something that I’m reawakening to, is the human-human.

  “Here’s what I mean by the human-human. Several years ago, in Dharamsala, India, I had the opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama. Now, granted, it’s the Dalai freakin’ Lama, so you already get everything that’s packed in that package, but at the same time when I got to meet him in person, my experience wasn’t ‘He is so spiritual. I want to ask him all these profound questions because he’s emanating this glowing gloriousness.’ Instead, what I was struck by was his humanity. After the encounter, I ran out of there and went and called my mom from one of those funny and unreliable pay phones. Everyone is in the street shouting and rickshaws are going by and it was madness. My mom picked up her phone in Chicago, where it was some ridiculous time in the morning. ‘What? What? Who’s calling?’

  “I said, ‘Mom, I just met my first human!’

  “ ‘What? Are you on drugs? What’s happening over there?’ my mom asked. It was such a revelation, because it wasn’t his spirituality that was impressing me, it was his humanity. He was so alive, and that’s what I go by. Who is living? Even if it’s just that they’re living by screaming in pain, or maybe they’re depressed that day and are the furthest fucking thing from manifesting their positive intentions, but the ones among us who are human-human have a quality and a pulse that’s unmistakable.

  “It’s a pulse that we all crave, both inside and outside ourselves. I don’t think this has anything to do with spirituality. Sometimes spirituality can get in the way of what’s most truly alive in us. The soul realm brings us back to life—it’s the part of us all that I try to keep my eyes and my heart open to.”

  PRACTICE

  Perfectly Imperfect

  I think Sera and I agree we’re both aware that each of us is still a highly flawed and fucked-up being. It comes with the territory of this whole human experience, and to pretend otherwise is a disservice to cultivating a relationship with our lives and how we can use them to help tap into the Divine nature (or source, life, God, Buddha mind, Christ consciousness, Brahman, the One, or whatever you care to call it). I like the term “perfectly imperfect” because to me it sums up the dualistic nature we live our lives from. A lot of the time we’re identified with our limited and finite self, our bodies. For the sake of clarity, let’s explore this a little deeper before moving on to the practice itself.

  We have five cognitive senses: hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell. We have organs of speech, locomotion, grasping, excretion, and procreation. We also have a mind that thinks and brings awareness to this experience of our physical manifestation. When these things are removed from the equation, however, all that’s left is pure, present, witnessing awareness, and that is our true Self (or again, whatever you care to call it).

  The cool thing is that this witnessing awareness underlies every moment of every day, whether we’re aware of it or not. It’s always there. In his book The Integral Vision, Ken Wilber (whom you’ll meet later in this book) gives some simple yet remarkably lucid instructions on how to engage this practice:

  Notice your present awareness. Notice the objects arising in your awareness—the images and thoughts arising in your mind, the feelings and sensations arising in your body, the myriad objects arising around you in the room or environment. All of these objects arising in your awareness.

  Now think about what was in your awareness 5 minutes ago. Most of the thoughts have changed, most of the bodily sensations have changed, and probably most of the environment has changed. But something has not changed. Something in you is the same now as it was 5 minutes ago. What is present now that was present 5 minutes ago?

  I AMness. The feeling-awareness of I AMness is still present. I am that ever-present I AMness. That I AMness is present now, it was present a moment ago, it was present a minute ago, it was present 5 minutes ago.2

  What I love is that Ken goes on to ask us to consider that this witnessing, present awareness, or I AMness, was extant not only five minutes ago but also five hours ago, five years ago, five centuries ago, five millennia ago, and so forth. It always has been and always will be, especially right now in this very moment, because when you get right down to it, what else is there besides this very moment?

  As I’ve worked with this practice over the years, it’s helped me soften to the flawed human being that is Chris Grosso, because it’s shown me in the most undeniable of terms (which is to say, direct experience) that this physical body, which is certainly a part of my experience, is just that—only a part of my experience, and a very temporary one at best. When I find I’m locked in a mental shit storm about how I fucked something up or why I’m such a terrible human being, on a good day, I’m able to catch myself, take a couple of slow, deep breaths, and anchor into the I AMness to impartially witness the mental parade of ridiculousness that’s going on. In that place of impartial witnessing, it’s A-okay that I’m imperfect, because as I AMness, I’m also perfect, and that’s just the way this crazy fucking thing called life is. This practice helps us learn to relax into life’s often-tumultuous currents instead of fighting them, to just take the ride. Like the Zen proverb says, “Let go or be dragged.”

  8

  A LONELY CONSCIOUSNESS IN A BAG OF FLESH

  CONVERSATION WITH CHELSEA ROFF

  I’d known about Chelsea Roff for years, and even though I’m sure we’ve given presentations at many of the same c
onferences, our paths never crossed, which bummed me out, because I was familiar with her story of overcoming a severe eating disorder that almost took her life but instead led to her becoming a well-respected and sought-after yoga teacher. Knowing of Chelsea’s commitment to helping others who struggle with eating disorders and other afflictions heal, plus her ability to connect her understanding to neuroscience, I was excited to include her story and wisdom in this book.

  I wanted to begin with an excerpt from an article she so beautifully and candidly wrote:

  Fifteen-year-olds aren’t supposed to have strokes. At least that’s what I thought. I try not to think about it too much. Even now, I only have bits and pieces; shards of memories that somehow remained intact even through the trauma my brain endured that day.

  When I arrived at Children’s Medical Center, I weighed just 58 pounds. After a five-year battle with Anorexia Nervosa, my body had reached its breaking point. Nearly every system in my body was shutting down. All four valves in my heart were leaking. My skin was yellow from liver failure. I hadn’t taken a shit in over a month. I was dying.

  The first emotion I remember is rage. It was a violent, fire-in-your-veins, so-angry-you-could-kill-someone kind of rage. I wanted out. I wanted the pain to be over. I wanted to die. I was mad at myself for not having the courage to just do it quickly, angry at the hospital staff for thwarting my masked attempt. I was convinced that I was “meant to” endure this, that my long-drawn-out starving to death would prove my willpower to God. In the days prior to my stroke, I’d had vivid hallucinations—of Jesus on a wooden cross outside my bedroom window and a satanic figure sneaking up under my bedroom covers to suffocate me at night. I thought I was meant to be a martyr.

  I thought God wanted me to die.1

  The details of Chelsea’s and my stories are different circumstantially, but they intersect in many ways, particularly that at such a young age, we both believed God wanted us to die. I was sure it wasn’t easy for her to talk about those experiences, but I hoped she’d discuss whatever she could about those times, to help readers truly understand that no matter how bad it gets, it’s never too late to come back—there’s always hope.

  Chelsea was willing to share this dark period of her life, though she knew it wouldn’t be easy. “That excerpt begins at the height of my experience. Up until that point, I’d endured a five-year battle with anorexia. It didn’t develop out of nowhere. When I looked back at my family system, I realized I had a biological predisposition to mental health challenges: My mom dealt with an eating disorder in her youth, and throughout my mom’s family there was anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. During my childhood, my mom was an active alcoholic and dealt with some drug issues as well. I was raised by a lesbian couple in the late eighties before marriage equality, and in some way that compounded that strife, because the political situation had an impact on my childhood. My other mom couldn’t get custody of my sister and me as my mom sort of descended into her own mental health challenges. There were issues with violence and neglect, and it was a chaotic household. There was no safe place.

  “The thing that they say about eating disorders and any mental health and substance abuse challenge is that genetics loads the gun and trauma pulls the trigger. I may have been biologically predisposed to undereating or to using food to cope with difficult emotions, but I think because I had a lot of adversity early in life, I was more likely to grab on to coping mechanisms that weren’t healthy in the long run. I was nine or ten when my body started to change, and that was right around the time that things got the most difficult at home. I think going on a diet felt like the most logical response to not feeling okay in the world.

  “I often say that eating disorders are socioculturally shaped illnesses. I had an experience when I was nine or ten years old of suffering, and I think we all have that experience of pain. It’s like Buddhism 101—life is pain. One of the ways people respond to suffering is with food or substances, so I thought if I could change and fix my body, I’ll finally feel okay again. Because of the genetic predisposition I had, it spiraled into more than a diet. It became addictive in the same way that alcohol or other substances can be addictive. I found that when I was thinking about what I was going to eat or not going to eat, or what I had just eaten or how long I was going to spend on the treadmill, there was no room for pain or fear or shame or any of the difficult emotions that had become hard to deal with. It was just the ultimate distraction. I felt a sense of power and control. That was compounded by sexual trauma in my adolescence. I found that as I lost weight, I became less attractive to men, and that was comforting, because it made me feel safe. There was a massive confluence of circumstances, and the stroke was at the very height of all of that.”

  What Chelsea said made me think about a workshop I held with some young adults at a rehab facility. We were talking about how some of them struggled with food issues. I told them how I too have issues with food, and how later in my life I looked back and saw how when I was a child and a preteen, I ate sugary treats in the same way I would later consume drugs and alcohol—consume, consume, consume for that high that’s never quite high enough. That’s part of why, when I’m asked about my clean time now, I’ll tell people I’m sober today (if that). This is because I do at times still eat in ways that are addictive, or binge-watch TV shows as a means of diversion. It’s significantly less than it used to be, but I’m still acting out in obsessive and compulsive ways; I’m just abusing different substances. I know better, so I don’t feel comfortable saying, “I’m clean and sober for x years,” because I’m not. The substances are the substances, and the real issue is my behavior and the way I handle myself and act out at times again, regardless of the substance.

  Chelsea got where I was coming from. “I always say I consider myself in recovery or even recovered from an eating disorder—it’s been about ten years—but I’m not recovered from life. That means I’m not superhuman, so there are days when I reach toward relationships and work addiction or whatever to numb my feelings. I think the difference is that I’ve got more compassion and awareness around it, so instead of beating myself up or punishing myself, I have a compassionate curiosity.”

  Beautifully said. That’s something I talked about at a workshop I led. One of the participants asked me to name one thing I would have changed about myself during my process of recovery and learning to live a spiritual lifestyle. I told him I wished I’d learned to cultivate a greater expression of compassion and softness toward myself. Just as Chelsea said—bringing a compassionate curiosity to my pain, because again, we’re all in some sort of pain.

  That’s how I try to present the material I talk about or write about. Sure, the underlying theme is going to be drugs and alcohol, because that’s where my own pain and suffering cropped up, but you can replace “drugs and alcohol” with whatever your struggle happens to be. In my case, part of the pain and suffering was relapses. Was this something that happened for Chelsea?

  It was. “As I moved along the path from ten to seventeen, there were multiple relapses. I would go from this raging river of my home life—there was a lot of violence and a lot of addiction there—to a hospital, which was a safe place. And it would be, like, ‘I don’t need my life vest here anymore, because the waters are a lot calmer,’ but then they’d send me home and none of the coping techniques I’d learned in the hospital worked. I was drowning.”

  I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone talk about this like Chelsea did! Even though I hated that I had to be in rehab, I was so comfortable there. I don’t mean comfortable in the sense that they were cushy rehabs, because they were anything but, but I mean comfortable in that I was safe within those walls. Even if contraband was being brought in, which it often was, I’d always be in such a broken place by the time I’d enter a rehab that the last thing I wanted to do was touch drugs or alcohol. My body had had enough.

  “That was always my experience in psychiatric hospitals—it was miserable, but i
t was better than where I’d been before. There was order and predictability, if you think of first-chakra stuff in yoga.” The first chakra is associated in the yogic tradition with safety, grounding, and support. “When my first-chakra needs were met, it was better than where I’d been before. At seventeen I was emancipated and left the hospital. The first two years of recovery were rocky, but I wasn’t relapsing. It was just tough. It was like going through mud. I had an experience of having an eating disorder, and that was one version of suffering. There was also an experience of being in recovery from having an eating disorder, and that experience was choosing not to give in to urges to starve myself because I wanted to live again. Every single time I sat down at a meal, I would have to choose. After a couple of years, the urge to starve myself went away, and that was remarkable, because I hadn’t lived like that before. The experience of looking in the mirror and loathing myself started to go away.

  “I’ve had an experience of having an eating disorder and I’ve had an experience of being in recovery from an eating disorder. The experience that I refer to as ‘recovered’ is distinctly different than being in recovery. I’m not saying that it’s the end of the path, but there’s a difference between resisting urges and not having the urge to starve or restrict at all. It’s gone, and I don’t know where it went.”

  I was impressed by the lens through which Chelsea saw the world. I know in some of the formal twelve-step fellowships it’s said that over time the obsession to use will be lifted. You must do the work—whether it’s the formal steps or other practices—but once you do that and continue to sweep your side of the street, so to speak, the obsession lifts. What I learned through many relapses is that I wasn’t willing to go in and touch those raw and vulnerable places. I had crafted some strong heart-armor, but with time and work the pieces began to fall away. However, there were still some very strong pieces in place, and this became clear to me within the context of my marriage as I began recognizing that there were aspects of pain and fear I wasn’t willing to go to in connection to that relationship. I also wasn’t talking to anyone about it, and sure enough, with time—relapse. It was inspiring to hear where Chelsea was in her life now, a place she considered herself to be recovered.