Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  “One thing I try to stress is that when people single you out, it’s because you’re not embracing mediocrity. This world loves mediocrity. This world loves football games and bars and social media and things that don’t have any point or purpose or growth or anything else behind them. If you’re doing something else that threatens that mediocrity, you know that you’re on the right path. When someone criticizes me, I look at that person and, as unspiritual as this sounds, I say, ‘If you think I’m fucked-up, I must be okay.’ The minute they start thinking I’m okay, then I know I’ve got a problem.”

  It’s like when I’ve caught shit from so-called spiritual people based on nothing more than my appearance, but I recognize that’s on them, not me. If someone else wants to judge you based on your appearance or on the fact that you relapsed, that speaks volumes about their character, not yours, especially if you take the higher road and don’t engage them. I found it interesting that Damien used the words “knuckle up,” as I’d used that exact phrase just a couple of days before our conversation while writing a blog post about being dedicated to showing up for yourself and to the process of waking up. We need to knuckle the fuck up, time and time again. When we think that we don’t have it in us to do it anymore, we’re going to have to do it again.

  Damien brought these ideas back to spiritual practice. “People have this idea that when they start a spiritual practice—whether it’s Buddhism or Hinduism or Magick—life is going to be all sunshine and unicorns. I always tell people that the reason we’re in this world is to grow, learn, and develop. When you take on a spiritual practice, what you’re doing is accelerating your growth. Therefore, you’re going to encounter more of the hard things. That doesn’t mean your life is necessarily getting any harder, because you were going to have to face the same lessons anyway. It means you’re getting to face them sooner than you would have had you not consciously and deliberately chosen to accelerate your growth and maturity.”

  Walking an honest path toward spiritual maturity, regardless of the tradition or lack thereof, is going to ask everything of us. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. If I hadn’t started my stumble down the spiritual path, I would be dead (that’s not a metaphor). Thanks to the practices and teachers in this book and my life, I’m still fucking here.

  I’ve continued to fall down, but I’m quicker to catch myself when it happens, and I remember that today I deserve better. You do, too.

  PRACTICE

  The Middle Pillar

  Damien taught me a foundational practice of ceremonial Magick called the Middle Pillar. He said it was like working with the chakras, the seven energy centers that run down the center line of the body—which was something I was familiar with. Damien explained that in ceremonial Magick, there are five key points in different places in the body, each with its own Hebrew mantras.

  Damien said, “I always tell people that they’re a straw. Before they were born, they had a channel connecting them to Divinity that was completely open. The moment they incarnated in the physical realm, that channel began to collect gunk, because it’s never cleaned out. The Middle Pillar begins to clear out that channel, clear out that straw, so more of the Divine energy, the intelligence of the Divine, and interaction with the Divine can flow through us. Think of it like doing calisthenics for your energy body, strengthening your physical body.

  “When you begin this practice, it may take up to an hour, but once you’ve been practicing for a while, you can do it in seconds. There’s no rule for how long to do the practice, but Magick is like anything else—the more effort and time you put into it, the more you’re going to get out of it.”

  Here are the steps:

  • As you do this practice, envision breathing in pure energy from the universe in the form of white light. With every inhalation, allow it to fill up a specific area of your body. With each inhalation, imagine that body part is growing brighter and brighter as it fills with white light.

  • With the first inhalation, envision the white light filling your feet.

  • With the second inhalation, envision the light filling your shins and calves.

  • With the third inhalation, it fills your thighs.

  • Continue moving from your feet to your head, filling your body with brilliant, glowing white light.

  • You’ll feel calm and focused, and will be ready to do whatever meditation or energy work is at hand.

  15

  THIS BEAUTIFUL, BROKEN REALITY OF THE HUMAN CONDITION

  CONVERSATION WITH MIRABAI STARR

  Relapse has brought me to my knees (and as you know by now, I’m not speaking metaphorically) more than once, but it has also connected me to a place of gentleness. Surprisingly, at moments, this gentleness became something I could extend toward the situation of my suffering as well as my suffering itself—something I never could have done in the past when relapse was a full-on spiral of self-destruction. Mirabai Starr showed up for me in a big way after my last relapse. She is a tender and wonderful person, a dear friend. Her books have inspired me throughout my life, especially Caravan of No Despair, about the stage of her spiritual life that commenced on the day her daughter Jenny died. My conversation with Mirabai was especially meaningful because she didn’t try to placate me about my addictions and mistakes, but instead bore loving witness to my situation and the pain I shared with her.

  “You’re showing up for your relapse and you’re embracing your humanity while modeling for others how to do that, and that’s all we can do.” Mirabai spoke exactly the words I needed to hear! “I don’t know any enlightened beings. I used to think that was the goal, but I don’t think we get perfection, and I know you know that. All we can do is be present for all of it, no matter how yucky, with humility, humor, and gentleness.”

  She knows of what she speaks. “I come from a family of addicts and alcoholics. Everyone who was active is now either dead or in recovery. I was in my early twenties when my father went into recovery, and my brothers and one of my nephews have been very active with substances. My father, as an agnostic Jew in the first generation of Jewish families after the war, after the Holocaust, did not believe in God, and he struggled mightily with that aspect of Alcoholics Anonymous. He found ways to reconcile his lack of belief with the absolute necessity to humble himself and get on his knees and put himself into the loving arms of something greater than himself. He somehow managed, through his big brain, to talk his way into a relationship with a higher power, but it was a lifelong struggle for him. My brother is so much like him—he’s another tortured artist with a huge soul. It’s also an issue, but my brother uses mystical poetry, not as God, but to cultivate a relationship with a higher power that sustains him in his path of recovery.

  “I believe that when we’re in our darkest places of despair, we are being held in the arms of a loving presence, of a loving reality, which is ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is absolute love, and we are being held in those arms when we need it most, even though it’s invisible. That’s the bottom line for me. Whether we conceive of those loving arms as the arms of the mother, or the beloved, or of our own true self, we’re never abandoned.”

  I could certainly relate to what she was saying. I’ve written in the past about times when I’ve been out running and felt held by the arms of the beloved, as Mirabai describes it. I’ve also felt myself in rapture with the mother while listening to bands like Sigur Rós and, believe it or not, even Slayer. Hell, even the raw and ragged writing of Charles Bukowski has brought me to that place on occasion. But just like Bukowski and his tendency toward booze and women to escape reality, even during periods of my own “sobriety” I would still find myself engaging in “little” relapse-style behaviors to escape reality (like overeating some sugary treats, or watching several hours more than I should of Stranger Things), though you could argue there is no such thing, and I wouldn’t put up much of a fight.

  Mirabai had an expansive view of relapse as well. “For you, it might be drugs or
alcohol. For me, it’s patterns of getting triggered by people in ways that make me hate myself for how I behave when I’m triggered. How do I approach those relapses as not being failures but being tender little moments of Mirabai-ness? I know that they don’t feel like little moments, especially when you’re thinking about relapses with drugs and alcohol and you can destroy relationships and a lot of damage can happen in those explosions, so it’s not just having a fight with your sister over some petty thing where you end up acting out. There are degrees of relapse that have consequences. For me, as the sensitive being that I am, any kind of unskillful behavior feels like the end of the world. How do I not go to that place when I screw up? When my self-image is shattered, how do I see that as grace, as a gift? Intellectually, I get it. I can tell someone else how to do it or what they need to do.” Then Mirabai shared a quote she loved from Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s book The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness:

  Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom.1

  “Our beauty is intermixed with our neurosis, and it’s what makes us juicy, full, whole humans. I can easily explain that to somebody else, but when it happens to me, I just want the earth to open and swallow me. I don’t know how to avoid those pitfalls. I’m not sure that they’re anything less than perfect when they happen. How can we be humble enough to accept that there’s nothing special about our failures? They’re just our participation in this beautiful, broken reality of the human condition.”

  I knew I could count on Mirabai to take the conversation to a deep, spiritual place, and she didn’t disappoint. I asked her about specific ways our spiritual practices can serve us, even during the times when we do lose it, when we relapse emotionally or to a specific substance or self-defeating behavior. “One is when things are steady. There are ups and downs, but they’re not dramatic. That’s when our practice comes in handy, as we deal with the small challenges like an argument with a friend or a family member and we’re able to come back to presence in the moment.” She went on to say that spiritual practice “also serves us well when we have extreme challenges, even traumas. Not that we can necessarily meditate our way through tragedies, but we can instinctively reach for practices like Tonglen when we’re going through extreme crisis because they blow away all our attachments.”

  I knew about Buddhist Tonglen meditation from Pema Chödrön’s teachings. The Tibetan word “Tonglen” can loosely be defined as “giving and taking.” It’s a way of breathing in suffering and exhaling joy that helps us develop our compassion and ability to be present for ourselves and others. Tonglen is a way to work with our most challenging experiences—relapse, heartbreak, grief—to subject them to the fire of transformation. This burns away our opinions, leaving us with the matter at hand.

  Mirabai got personal—deeply personal—as she explained how meditation helped her survive her daughter Jenny’s death. At first Mirabai couldn’t do any formal practices. “They almost felt like an insult, but years of training in contemplative practice carved a place in my soul where the only thing that made sense was to be fully present, or as present as I possibly could be with the loss of a child. In doing so, I found my place in the interconnected web of being so that I could viscerally encounter my place in the human family, in the human condition.”

  Not all the things wrong in our life are huge. There’s the big stuff that stands out, but there’s also the whole middle range of human experience. The little stuff may not devastate us, but it still kind of sucks. Mirabai meant things like “jealousy in romantic relationships or family members giving you a hard time, or worrying about teenagers. In my case, as adolescents, my girls knew exactly how to hurt me, how to get me to lose my center. They were masterful at that.” She pointed out that it is so important to engage in spiritual practice around those kinds of things—it’s like training for the big race. For every crisis, there are a million aggravations, hurt feelings, rejections, or other places of discomfort that can accrue and nudge us toward self-destructive behavior when we need to treat ourselves with care and compassion to fortify ourselves for the big stuff.

  Mirabai shared that “having cultivated the discipline of these practices means that even if we can’t meditate or engage in mindfulness practice or Tonglen or loving-kindness or anything else when we’re in the middle of a crisis, having done them has helped us with our ability to come back.” This is key when we think about relapse or self-harm or any kind of damaging behavior or thought. “We can’t use the practices themselves when we’re on fire necessarily, and that’s okay.”

  It’s like with running or weight training—after a while, your muscles develop memory, similar in a way to Mirabai’s describing “spiritual training” and its effects. Take weight lifting, for example—there have been times when I’ve had a cold or just been exceptionally busy and have had to take time off. Yet when I get back to it, if it’s within a few days, the muscle memory is still there, and I’m not starting over from scratch. I may have to drop the weights down a few pounds, or, if I’m running, cut a couple of miles as I ease my way back into things, but again, it’s not like starting over. That said, like exercise, life and love can be hard. Exceptionally fucking hard.

  As Mirabai explained, “The path of the heart is a fierce path, but people want to think about the way of love as being fluffy and comfortable and comforting. To walk the path of conscious grief is not about consolation, it’s about transformation. And I would say the same thing for any conscious spiritual path. It’s nice when we get the goodies, when we get the moments of euphoria and the moments of epiphany and great clarity. Those are the nourishment we need to keep us moving forward on our path, but they’re not the goal. The true work is to be able to show up for our lives with this sort of unconditional love and to cut through illusion. It can be messy and not pretty or comfortable.

  “I think about this almost every day when I have something arise in me that I’m less than proud of, which happens continuously. It’s so tempting to get away from it, to do anything I can to not feel what at first masquerades as shame. I would rather not feel that, so I have my addictions, which are the stories that I tell myself in my mind about what’s going on. They’re surefire ways to take me away from the experience, those little compelling narratives that I’m so good at. I must remind myself to come back to the most uncomfortable feelings, and not only to bear them but to bear witness to them in a very close, attentive way.”

  The little stuff of life can prepare us for the big stuff. And then, when we get to the other side of it—a relapse, say—it can provide a huge opportunity for transformation. Using my hospitalization, for example, I knew walking out of there that I was either going to die or thrive, and thanks to all the “muscle memory” of the spiritual practices I’d been using for several years, I could and did come back from that stronger than ever. Grace can be found in even self-inflicted near-death experiences. It lit a fire under my ass to look deeper at the unresolved pain I still carried inside me, to find ways to tap into the unconscious guilt and shame I’ve held for so many years so I could heal myself more fully. That’s not to say fully heal, because I don’t know if such a thing exists, but I believe in the capacity to heal more fully. I’m a living example of that. Maybe you are, too. It’s not a selfish pursuit to heal yourself, because as you do that, your capacity to help others heal grows as well. Mirabai was a shining example of this as she held space for me in my misery, something she could do because she’s endured tremendous pain in her life as well and worked with it and healed it to the extent she was capable.

  By sharing a teaching that had transformed her life, Mirabai transformed mine. That teaching was the dark night of the soul based on the teachings of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross. It’s one that is incredibly useful for people in any kind of recovery. “One of its definitive features is that we don’t usually know that we’ve had a dark
night of the soul until after it’s over, until after it’s passed. This would speak more to people who are on the other side of a relapse. Those are the people who will most identify with this teaching, because when we’re in a true dark night of the soul, we cannot know that spiritual transformation is happening. We cannot know that there is any hope at all to see the other side of the darkness we’re in. If we weren’t abject, it wouldn’t be an authentic dark night of the soul. At least part of it must be impenetrable darkness. This path is not for the faint of heart. It’s not for people looking for prosperity consciousness or making their world better.”

  This summed up every bleak moment I’d experienced in my life—all the times I found myself hospitalized or in a psych unit, a detox, or a rehab, waking up in a jail cell and not knowing how I’d gotten there, or waking up the morning after a blackout drunk and seeing the self-inflicted cuts in areas I didn’t know how to hide.

  “The dark night of the soul is not about navigating a difficult situation in our lives. Even those powerful ones like a personal loss of some kind, the death of a loved one, the death of a relationship, or other shattering losses—those circumstances can be the catalyst for the experience of a dark night of the soul, but as we all know, a single difficult, painful life event does not necessarily mean spiritual transformation. A true dark night of the soul is often invisible, even to the person who’s having one. It might have absolutely nothing to do with external circumstances. It’s a private, spiritual crisis.”