The Addiction Worm

The Worm’s Waking

There is a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly, he wakes up,

call it Grace, whatever,

something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.

He is the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,

the fruit, the trunks,

a growing wisdom and joy

 that does not need to devour.

This poem by Rumi is so good that it doesn’t need any comment, but that has never stopped me before! 

It became clear to me early on in the evolution and development of Integral Recovery that the agenda (Yes, I do have an agenda!) was not merely sobriety but waking up (and staying awake). And what I have found is that with the beautiful practices, technologies, and wisdom brought together under the aegis of Integral Recovery, this awakening is not only desirable but imminently possible.

Let me back up a little. In the late ’80s, I attended JFK University and studied to become a transpersonal therapist. One of the things we did at that early stage of development of transpersonal psychology was to define what transpersonal therapy was. The standard answer was that transpersonal psychology happens when a therapist “holds” a client in a transpersonal awareness, or space. This definition still holds true today. The only problem with the therapy is that simply holding people in a transpersonal space does not literally move them into that space very well. Traditional meditation methods were not doing it fast enough for my likes at the time either, and  using entheogens didn’t seem advisable for many reasons, foremost being they are illegal.

All in all, I became disenchanted with the whole talking therapy practice as I was looking to hit home runs and only occasionally seemed to be getting to first base. Eventually, this led to my becoming a wilderness guide and using vision quests, wilderness journeys, and sweat lodges in order to facilitate deep transformational and healing experiences. These techniques were certainly more impactful than talking therapy and many of my students were beginning to experience states that could be called transpersonal, but most of the time these states were merely temporary, always coming and going as states do.

In Integral Recovery, what we have been finding is that by integrating IR practices, the foundations of which are Holosync® binaural brain entrainment technology and contemplative wisdom from the great world spiritual traditions, a process of revelation occurs. I use the word revelation quite seriously because it seems that a lot of what we are learning is truly being revealed and, at times, this feels like grace or a gift from a higher source (in between all the hard work). Clients are not only getting sober, but are beginning to wake up―in the sense of Rumi’s worm. They are becoming less rigid, more spiritually connected, more caring for themselves and others, and are not getting stuck in their own habitual conditioned patterns of thought and behavior. As a consequence of this waking up process, or as a part of it, the addiction to eating grape leaves, or whatever the addiction, begins to lift. There is new care and new connection that grows from love of self to love of “my group,” then on to love of everyone and love of all beings and all things. Finally, because we have added and integrated these practices, talking therapy has now become incredibly illuminated, useful, and transpersonal!

When I first started coaching people online, I thought my main job would be to get them to do the practices and the rest would take care of itself. This is partially true―a lot of the first part of my work with clients is about explaining the process and holding them accountable to do the daily practices. After that has been established as a foundation, however, the discursive part of the therapy has become extremely powerful because both client and therapist have access to these transpersonal dimensions of our beings. So, it is no longer merely a theoretical proposition or how we hold the client, but we are actually exploring the terrain together. In this context, one of the very interesting and inspiring things that I am discovering is that I (the therapist) and we (the client) don’t really have to understand what is going on, but as we work together there seems to be a source of wisdom that we can tap into together because of the practices that we both do on a daily basis that keep us in touch with and growing more deeply into our own centers and spiritual selves.

I recently heard a talk by Father Thomas Keating, a pioneer of bringing the Centering Prayer and the contemplative dimension back into current Christian practice, say that he did not feel that mental health was possible without access to the spiritual dimension. That access is now available to us using Holosync®, or binaural brain entrainment technologies, along with the wisdom of the great contemplative traditions. When, two or three weeks into the process, I explain different mediation practices such as Centering Prayer to my clients, they seem to grasp what I’m talking about almost immediately. This is because they are actually beginning to experience these dimensions of depth in their own daily practice. This happens within a few weeks, not a few years.

One of the greatest challenges to a contemplative or meditative practice, one facilitated by Holosync®, is what I call the meditative super ego. In other words, we have many ideas and assumptions about what we think successful meditation should look and feel like. Once I get my students over that hump, the process becomes much more graceful and exciting as the exploration deepens. What we are doing in the Upper Right Quadrant, on the physical level, is rapidly integrating the brain and having it function more coherently. In the Upper Left Quadrant, or in our individual interiors, all kinds of interesting things are happening. Each client or student has a different experience but emotional and spiritual progress is accelerated and a radical hope begins to emerge, stemming from the grace that we seem to have access to now.  I find this a beautiful example of putting theory to work, using the theory or map to enlighten and infuse the territory and the journey though it with clarity and meaning. Remember, the Integral impulse is not this or that but this and that, or yes and, yes and. Every time that I find a new technique, technology, nuance, or connection, the whole process constellates into a more beautiful, graceful, and functional pattern.

In this practice, we are not only working on our spiritual line, but also on our emotional line. In Father Keating’s work on Centering Prayer, he talks about something which he calls divine therapy, which is what occurs when one surrenders in contemplation on an ongoing basis. It seems that the locks to the unconscious begin to let go and the split off, unconscious material, sub personalities, etc. begin to surface into awareness and are able to be released, healed, and integrated in this spacious, open (divine) awareness; the self becomes more functional, resilient, and more contextualized, in an ever deepening field of connection and meaning. This closely parallels what we have been finding in IR practice. Not only do my students begin to access their own depths spiritually, they are also able to quickly get in touch with their own core wounds. These two processes work together beautifully: the spiritual aspect supplies the faith that everything on the deepest level is okay, and emotionally there is an expanded context or sense of Self, in which space the painful unconscious and shadow material can surface and be released and transmuted in the light of our pure loving awareness.

So, what we have here is a growing, living  Integral spirituality that can be understood and languaged in whatever tradition or language one chooses and, at the same time, a way of getting to the unconscious, yet powerfully controlling, material that keeps us trapped in our own rigid defense mechanisms―or slaves of our own chaotic attempts to avoid the pain, i.e. addiction.

…And, we don’t have to eat the grape leaves anymore.

A Gift from Christmas

This Christmas, I found myself at home in Teasdale, Utah with a house (and guest house) full of mostly new faces, one of whom was detoxing off a heavy mix of drugs and alcohol.  Welcome to my world. A new Integral Recovery intensive was in its first week. I had to cancel my almost yearly Christmastime visit to my weird, wacky family, all of whom I love and who are delightful in their own ways but often a couple of levels apart on the good old dynamic Spiral, or whatever developmental map we are using this week. It makes for interesting conversations, both spoken and avoided. I have as yet to take the bait in the “Obama is the Anti-Christ” challenge.

Anyway, I was working in my office and my charges had gone on a hike to Lion’s Head, a red rock wonderland about a mile and a half from my door. I was drowsy and decided to take a nap. When I awoke, I was in a deep funk. I left the house and drove to the local do-it-yourself car wash and began to wash off the accumulated muck that my wife, a wilderness therapist, collects on our Toyota 4-Runner when she visits her clients in the wilderness this time of year. Keeping our cars up is one of my domestic duties that I kind of enjoy and do faithfully. I think this is one of the biggest miracles that my wife cites, when asked her opinion on my transformation over the last few years of intense Integral practice. She starts in, “You should have seen his old pick-up…”

So, as I’m driving to the car wash, a feeling of sadness is growing in my gut and covering my whole body. And I realize that I’m missing my family and my wife, who is with her mother, and this is the first time that I have had to really feel these feelings. Before, I was just shrugging them off with the whole “a man has got to do what a man has got to do” routine, as I worked with the new arrivals for the intensive. “Man, what a Christmas,” I think and my ego starts trying to conjure a way out of this profound growing sadness.

Some wiser voice asks, “What would you tell your students to do in this case?” I answer, “I’d tell them to open to the feeling, be totally present with it, and invite it in as a long lost friend or teacher. So, I take the long way home and allow the loneliness and sad isolation to sink into me. It builds and I breathe and it builds… Then something that has begun emerging in my practice happens, my personal pain begins to shift into something larger, a collective pain, and I realize that many people are having this same sort of suffering right now, perhaps millions all over the planet. And, instead of feeling isolating and dreadful, the pain starts to become warm and somehow infused with light and compassion. I am deeply moved.

When I get back home, my group is returning from their hike and we go up to the meditation room for our nightly meditation. My sit turns into a prayer of gratitude for all the wonderful people and places that I have in my life. The day and the night that follow are filled with song, laughter, tears, and good fellowship-an extraordinary gift.

So, this is the gift that I offer to you: When pain arises and suffering comes, as it surely will, invite it in as a teacher and allow it to express itself in your body and mind as it wants to. Then go deeper yet and allow that pain to connect you to all who are suffering similarly in the world, past, present, and to come, and something very beautiful will arise, the gift compassion, which literally means, in the Latin root words, “to suffer with.”

With all the Love of God that was said to be born into the world this day, I offer this gift and wish you a Merry Christmas and a Holy New Year.

Integral Recovery and Shadow Work: The Recovery of Spirit

In the unfoldment of the work that is Integral Recovery, the Shadow and its releasing and transmutation have become ever more one of the chief cornerstones of the building. First, what is Shadow? It is that which is in the darkness, which either through conscious thought or unconsciously has been relegated to the realms of the unseen, unheard, and unknown. This unconscious material can be good stuff, bad stuff, or indifferent; pre-personal, personal, or transpersonal; individual or collective. This realm of darkness contains our greatest gifts and our greatest sins and curses, and unlocking the doors that bar these hidden aspects of ourselves is the key to our survival, transformation, and continued evolution. In and through the Shadow lie our unique selves, our true faces, and recovery of the Spirit. Diving into this realm seems completely counter-intuitive and contrary to all common sense. Shouldn’t one avoid this journey into the nether realms that promises death, dismemberment, pain, and suffering? No, we shouldn’t. Why? Because it is the only way out of our human tragedy.

Again, I deeply bow to the great wisdom of Ken Wilber in including the Shadow as an essential aspect of the Integral map. Without this key, the key of the Shadow, all our work is done in vain: our sanghas become cults, our teachers become tyrants, our recoveries are temporary, our hope forlorn, and our future on this planet devolutionary and catastrophic.  In the words of Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest, spiritual teacher, and sacred activist:

“The mystics call it the apophatic tradition, the tradition that has to accompany the cataphatic. The spiritual life has a way of light and a way of darkness. The cataphatic is the way of the light. The apophatic is the way of darkness. Since the Enlightenment, most Western Christians have not been trained much in the apophatic tradition. But the tradition of darkness is the greater teacher, the necessary teacher, really the teacher that breaks a person down through and into this realm that our biblical tradition, our Judeo-Christian tradition, calls faith. At its depths, our tradition acknowledges the primacy of darkness as the greater teacher, as the greater expander of the soul, as the greater opener-up of the eyes.”

“This seems to be the wisdom that we should be bringing to the West today, but that certainly hasn’t been where most Catholic Christian theology has been for the last 300 years. We’ve wanted answers, we wanted clarity, we want closure, we want solutions which tell me that we have been more influenced by the ascendant Western civilization than what I will call, as a Christian, the descent language of Jesus, or Job, or the Jewish prophets, who are talking much more about this way of tears, this way about going into the Shadow, into the pain, into the dark side if you will, and that being where we would find wisdom. I think we are at a very difficult position in terms of Western spirituality, because it often feels, in many established church groups that I talk to, that we’re on a course that needs to be turned around 180 degrees. We will never find wisdom in this search for closure, answers, certitude, fixing, and explanation. It simply isn’t the path of wisdom.”

The way of healing, the way of wisdom, the way of transformation is the way of darkness, or the Shadow. The way of defeat is the way of trying to defeat the Shadow. The way of victory and the way of grace is the way of letting the Shadow defeat us. In the words of Rilke, from The Man Watching, translated by Bly:

“…When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.”

“Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.”

This is the way of darkness. And when we can, by grace and practice, begin to relax the contractions that keep the doors shut tight from these realms of darkness, pain, and the unknown, we begin the journey that perhaps could be called the beginning of wisdom.

How do we do this? I think the answer is in deep, contemplative, and meditative practice. In the words of Thomas Merton, “The contemplative learns that God is in the darkness too.” And, I might add, almost always comes through the very same. How does this work on the ground in 2009? One of my clues that something wants to emerge from the Shadow realms is I feel a sense of disquiet and want to do something to distract myself. The last thing I want to do is to sit with it. In the words of Quaker wisdom, I must “labor” with it.

The formula, as taught by Sally Kempton, is the following:

Identify the hurt,

identify the thoughts associated with the hurt,

let go of the thoughts,

and stay with the feeling.

This is the process, as Rilke said, of letting ourselves be overcome. And let me tell you, you will be overcome. This realm can be absolutely terrifying and as dark as your worst nightmare. But the job of the individual or the spiritual teacher is to help us hold the pain and the darkness. And in holding it, to be overcome, dismembered, and ultimately transformed and resurrected.

The capacity to do this takes practice, grace, and faith in the ultimate goodness of the universe. Because sometimes it can feel like one is drowning in gore-infested quicksand. And this is where we come to the end of our rope. In the words of T.S. Eliot,

“You say I am repeating

Something I have said before.

I shall say it again.

Shall I say it again?

In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are,

To get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.”

Let me, at this point, give an example, something that happened in my meditation this morning. Over the last few days, I have been increasing my meditation from the normal one hour a day to two hours because I was beginning to pass through a period or a spell of depression and despondency. Again, as I have learned and been taught, the way out of this darkness is to literally get to the bottom of it-through the dark thoughts, painful emotions, and the coldness of fear and dread, where there is no light, where the world has lost its luminosity, and where hope and faith seem like cynical jokes.

To be in this space, and to hold it, to release all contractions and be devastated by it, is the point of return to the light, to your unique essence, and into the infinitude that is God. At this place of deep despair, my fear, despair, and self-loathing began to be transmuted. At this point, I had a vision in my meditation of the hero confronting an enormous, awful dragon, who was standing in front of a luminous treasure of gold. As I struggled with this dragon, with the terror and the fear, somehow I broke through to the treasure, and the dragon was no longer in opposition to me but became a great force, the power of faith, to protect the treasure and help me bring it forth into the world.

This is the secret of inner alchemy, that as we learn to lessen our egoic contractions through faith, in the Love that is God, that is our truest Self, the lead of our baser emotions changes and transmutes into the gold of pure luminescent Spirit, that which is beyond all states. What a great secret! It ain’t easy, but again and again it comes to me, “The only way out is through.” You can do it. It takes grace, faith and cohones the size of Mt. Sinai, but there it is, the way beyond the tragedy of human egoic existence into the Light of the incomprehensible Love of the all.

How do we develop this capacity? We practice as if our souls and world depended on it. As Sensei Diane Hamilton is wont to say, “Practice is cultivation through repetition.” This apophatic path of inviting the darkness has transformed my life and practice and it is doing the same in the students I am working with.

Recently, I was on a panel discussing Integral Christianity. And someone asked the panelists, “What is God for you?” The answer that arose in my heart without thought, like break of dawn over the Southern Utah desert, was… “God is the light in the darkness.”

Shadow (Again!)

In a recent conversation with my friend Rabbi Marc Gafni, he said something to the effect that “shadow is the part of your life that you have not lived.” And I thought to myself, “There goes Marc again, a Seven on the Enneagram, putting a happy spin on things.”

My current working definition of shadow is that shadow = that which is in the darkness.  I’ve come to this conclusion based about 60% on my inner work and work with my students, and about 40% on what others have written or said. What is in this darkness? Just about everything: Who and what you really are, your wounds, your wisdom, your amazing ungiven gifts, all of this, and more. As we practice and relax into our depths and learn to loosen our contractions, this stuff will emerge as night follows day. And as it does, these dark dragons (or light dragons) that have been hanging out in our unconscious come to be acknowledged, seen, felt, and transmuted into the light and life that we have not been living, as the Rabbi said.

Shadow elements do not just come from the long ago past, but from the right here present. Right now, I am in the process of surviving two family reunions back to back, my family’s and my wife’s. During this time, as I practice, dozens of little cuts and wounds from interfamilial interactions become very apparent, which need to be dealt with in the gross, subtle, and causal bodies in nondual openness. I think that maybe a lot of shadow work becomes ineffective when it does not encompass all the necessary energetic bodies; it becomes partial and therefore less than effective.

To use a military metaphor, sure to gross out and offend many readers, doing the merely cognitive recognition of shadow elements is like storming an enemy-occupied beach and having a map on the enemy pillboxes, machine gun emplacements, etc. This is a great help and could definitely save your ass, but to take the beach, you have to use guts, guns, bayonets and grenades to get beyond the mere map and take the damn beach. And most of the guys manning the emplacements are not going to give up without a fight. (Wouldn’t that be nice!) Again, this work of waking up the shadows and enlightening our darkness takes guts, great effort, and Grace (or serendipitous dumb luck for the less religious out there reading this).

So, this morning, as I was jogging on the beach on the next to the last day of this family reunion, I felt all the little emotional wounds arise to the surface of my awareness where I could allow them to express themselves as thoughts and emotions, hold them in gratitude and openness, and release them into my expanded awareness. This is a beautiful process and it works. (By the way, sometimes I like to double up on my practices. In this case, I jogged for a half hour down the beach, listening to the first half hour of my current level of Holosyncâ, and jogged a half hour back listening to the second half hour of Holosyncâ. Works great. Try it. This way, you get an hour of cardio plus an hour of great meditation and inner work.)

And a last note: As I was watching the footprints I had made in the sand on the return leg of my jog, I noticed that the ocean was already covering my tracks and I had one of those existential moments about life and all that we accomplish during this oh-so-short journey. Then I had a transpersonal moment, when I realized that he who was making the footprints was just a drop of the ocean itself, and the waves were simply returning the drop of consciousness to itself. Not an impersonal dead ocean (not less than personal, but more than personal, again the Rabbi) but an endless ocean of Love and Light, as Quaker founder George Fox described God. Does the drop survive as some discreet unit of awareness? Don’t know really. What I do know, what I do get, is that Ocean that we are, always have been, and always will be, is not wonderful-it is more than wonderful.

A Sense of Sin

It seems that lately in my practice (or perhaps it has always been so), as I approach the depths of my being, the inner light, God, what have you, I hit a thick layer of self-loathing, where my failures, imperfections, and neurotic conditioning-or to use the Christian language, my sinful nature or my sins-all become very apparent. As I approach the light of the rising inner sun, all the crap on my windshield becomes oh so very apparent. At that point, my prayer runs along the lines of “Oh, my God, forgive me!” Tears come to my eyes and I want to bury my head in shame. The clear light of God seems to call me to repentance for my blindness, lack of Love, on and on, and makes me cry out in my heart for forgiveness. If I don’t run or shut down at this point, out of fear and self-loathing, all my crap, conditioning, sins, and ego begin to be transluced by the Light and I am healed, forgiven (always have been), and the Father and I are not two. There is no place to fall but God… and there is only God. Then, all is somehow beautifully, wonderfully okay: life, death, good, evil, the whole shebang. It is okay.

In this light, the only possible response from my little, forgiven, transluced self is love, gratitude, practice, and service. How to talk about such a thing? Should I write about this experience, this knowing? How to write about such a thing in the light of my integrally informed cognitive acuity? The whole of the AQAL map is nothing but God. The whole manifest universe is nothing but God, and arises moment to moment in this pure presence, or as the Tibetans would say, “The Great Perfection.”

What to do with this and how does this apply to my work with my beloved addicts? I suppose that as we approach the Inner Light that is the core of our being, we will be pressed against the walls of whatever developmental structures we have in place or have developed. At Blue, we will be crashed against the commandments; at Orange shredded on the blades of our own rationality, our lost faith, and the utter failure of the rational and logical to fix ourselves and the world; at Green, we will drown in the despair of our own compassion and inwardly curse the Creator who allows the devouring of his own beautiful sacred world. At every level, the black hole of our own inadequacies collapses us into our own version of despair. We are sucked into the void, emptied into emptiness, and finally awoken into the light.

The secret seems to be to hold the annihilation of what we think we are until we are born again. The pain and chaos of addiction becomes the mother of our transformation-to be honored as the angel of God that leads us back. Over and over, from level through level, from life to life. As Rollie Stanich recently said, God cannot not fill us when we are emptied, when we finally arrive at our nothingness.  We bow our heads in the spirit of the great Franciscan prayer… “God, make us instruments of your peace.”

Depression: My Disease

While most of my work and writing in the last few years has focused on chemical dependency and addiction, my personal struggle and life-threatening illness has been depression. When I say depression, I am not talking about a case of the blues or being bummed out for a bit, but mind-crushing, soul-crushing hell. A pit so deep, a place so dark, that death beckons like a lover and the promise of non-existence offers a final hope. My struggle for life went on for a decade. During this time, hope was lost and I felt useless to myself, God, and others. Though my deepest prayer and desire was to find a path of service, the end was approaching and I had no strength left to hold on.

Why didn’t I end my life when it seemed the reasonable, the honorable, the only sane thing left to do?  The answer was clear. My beloved older brother had preceded me by committing suicide in the living room of my home. The only certainty I had was that I would not, could not ,do that to my family-not another son a suicide. God, please kill me, because I cannot. He didn’t and I am still here.

Looking back, it seems my first experience in the darkness happened in the early 90’s while I was living in the San Francisco Bay area. It felt like spiritual despair and physical exhaustion. In this fog I was given a gift. I found I was a writer of songs. So, I sang and I wrote and I played my guitar and it seemed that the gift of music kept many of my devils at bay… for awhile. Fast forward to Southern Utah 8 years later. After moving to Utah and immersing myself in the wilderness and the therapeutic wilderness industry, the bottom fell out of my life. I will spare you the gory details but let me enumerate the specific blows and stressors (this happened all within a couple of weeks):

• My dog was run over by a car.
• My brother killed himself in my living room.
• I lost my job.
• I lost my relationship through infidelity and betrayal with a trusted friend.
• I lost my home.

To use Integral speak, I was fucked in all four quadrants. I left and began to roam-Texas, California, Tennessee. The pain and shock were completely overwhelming. All the therapeutic techniques I knew seemed pitiful and inadequate, like trying to stop a tidal wave with an umbrella. So, I wandered and yondered, and found no respite. I wore sunglasses all the time so that people would not have to see my eyes, which appeared blank and vacuous to me, like open graves. I remember going to gyms a lot, trying to work out my pain and suffering by intensely moving iron. I think it kept me anchored in my body and the world and probably saved my life, or at least kept me alive-barely. The exact chronology of these year is unclear to me; I have dark and murky flashes of memory but no clear timeline. Eventually, I wound up at my parents’ home in Texas. As they say, home is where if you show up, they cannot and will not turn you away. I was a wreck.

A pattern to the depression began to emerge: I could function in the mornings, but sometime in the afternoon the darkness would fall, lifting again only after dusk. A darkness so grim and complete that all I could do was Iie in my room with drawn shades until it passed. The darkness seemed to last a thousand years; time was warped and slowed down. I could not read, I could not pray, I could not listen to music. I simply suffered in Hell. To contemplate even getting up to go to the bathroom or getting a drink of water felt like the energetic equivalent of climbing Everest.

I had a few hours of respite in the evening and morning hours and then I’d go through it all again. I remember the terror and the dread of watching the clock and awaiting the torments of the damned. Slowly a plan began to unfold. I would work on myself to try and heal myself in the good hours that were afforded me. I lifted weights, went to early morning aerobic classes, took vitamins and supplements, entered therapy, practiced Chi Gong-all in the morning before the crash. I began to resurrect a little. I got a part in a musical where I played the Elvis character in a hometown production of “Bye Bye Birdie.” It gave me fellowship, purpose, and some creative direction. This helped and the crashes diminished somewhat.

Looking back, I suppose it was my first attempt to devise a sort of Integral Practice, one born out of desperation, which certainly seems to be, in my case, “the mother of invention.” The problem was that I had no guiding model of healing, so I devised a tourniquet to staunch the flow of my life blood and headed back into the fray. But I didn’t keep up the practices that seemed to be helping, and for the most part abandoned them when I felt a little relief, throwing myself back into my life and work in a grim, fatalistic attempt to be of service while I still had a little strength left.

This became a pattern: during those periods when the darkness lifted, I would throw myself back into the fight to be of service and do something I considered noble, or meaningful, with “the last full measure of my devotion,” as if the hounds of hell were on my trail and there was not much time until they caught up with me. At the time, this meant wilderness therapy, as being a guide seemed to be the only thing that I was any good at and it met my inner standards for being of enough value to my people to keep me going and away from the valley of the shadow of death and despair.  The problem was that I kept exhausting myself and the days of darkness would begin again.

And so it went. I had periods in which I was okay, followed by periods where I would start the cycle of afternoon descents into the nether regions. I tried medications for awhile and was told that I would have to be on them for the rest of my life. The drugs left me feeling, well, drugged, and I couldn’t maintain steady employment because of the long periods of being incapacitated by the ever-returning spells. It was hard to keep paying for the medications or to keep paying health insurance, and I didn’t have the energy or inclination to file for some sort of government disability support.

Somewhere during this on again, down again, in Hell again, seesaw dance, I discovered William Styron’s profound little book, A Darkness Made Visible, in which Styron describes very accurately what I was going through and what had happened to my brother. Just finding this book brought a great relief of sorts-somebody else besides me and Rick had been through this. There is a picture of Styron in the book in which he has the same fallen face and empty, dull, thousand-yard-stare eyes that I saw in the mirror when I looked at myself during my descents. Just knowing that I was not alone was comforting, as one of the most horrible things about these periods was the feeling of utter isolation from others, God, everything.

Into this Manichean up and down struggle for my life and purpose, entered Ken Wilber, integralnaked.org, the AQAL^TM map, and Integral Life Practice. I have written extensively about this elsewhere so there is no need to tell the whole story again, but from the spiritual/Integral awakening that occurred at this point, I developed the Integral Recovery^TM model-or, more often than not it feels like I channeled it-with its application of the AQAL^TM map to the disease of addiction and Integral Recovery Practice as the vehicle of healing transformation and awakening for the addict. (By the way, in more cases than not, addiction begins with some variation on the disease of depression: the addict starts out trying to self-medicate her way out of depression by using drugs and alcohol, looking for blissful, temporary relief.)

In my innocence and Integral fervor, I did what Ken said to do, exercising the body, mind, heart, and soul. I also had the intuition that I was onto something very important and that my work and healing were not just for me, but that I was beginning to help cut that Kosmic groove (as happens to all of us are who have traversed the landscape of this unfolding, rollicking, Integral R-evolution) that would help many some day, especially my beloved addicts with whom I had been working for so many years both in and out of the wilderness.

At some point early on in my Integral journey, I listened to three audio files with Ken Wilber and Bill Harris talking about something called Holosync^TM and binaural brain entrainment.  My first thought was, “This sounds too good to be true, but what if it works only half as well as he says it does?” Then it would still be, could be, very important. I hemmed and hawed around for a bit, reading the papers, looking at the posts on the internet to see what people were saying, and finally laid my money down and ordered the first level.  The rest, as they say, is history. Within the first week of my using Holosync^TM, I experienced a class five spiritual awakening: body/mind dropped, “badabing!”, I was awake! Koans now made sense, I was cruising on non-dual, and I was simply this little johnness floating in a vast sea of luminescent consciousness that was my original face and that was my truest and vastly deepest self.

My first thought was, “Thank God, but this is ridiculous! Can it be this easy?” After that initial explosion of context and awareness, I spent the next nine months plunging into and releasing layer after layer of pain, shadow and trauma. And I found that I could stick with the process and the sometimes very scary nature of the encounter with my shadow elements, because of the vast and hugely expanded awareness that had come online for me in that first week of using Holosync^TM, and a new kind of inner wisdom that let me know that this was just what needed to happen, and that I was healing and  progressively becoming free. I also felt that what I was learning was important and would allow me to take others through this process in the future.

It has been four years now and the darkness has receded. I have had a few brief spells, but now I simply sit with it, and it burns off quickly under the transmutational fire and warmth of pure awareness. I am 53 now, and every day seems to be a miracle of Grace, flow, and endless possibility for depth, service, and growth for little john on the wave of God he is part and parcel of. The wind is in my face and tears are in my eyes as I ride the surfboard of my life, racing towards the shore where we all become one again and fade into the Light.

Confronting the Collective Shadow

I am nearing the end of my almost 4-week journey in Europe. As I write this, I am on a train from Berlin headed for Amsterdam, which will be the last leg of my trip before I fly back to the U.S. in four days. The time has been so rich in connections and learning that it will take a while for me to digest it all, but let me start with one of the main themes that emerged. 

The purpose of the trip was to teach and talk about Integral Recovery, with some extra time between talks and workshops to see if God had any other things in mind. As usual, She did. One of the first things that struck me was the amazing transformation of Germany and Europe since the end of the second WW, some 67 years ago. The transformation has been enormous – even since I was here as a soldier in the U.S. Army some 27 years ago. Europe is at peace, united and prosperous, and far ahead of us in the production of clean, renewable energy. Europe took care of the business of being a civilization to a much greater extent than we did, as we dawdled in cynicism, greed and paranoia. Now, however, things are changing. 

One of the themes that kept reoccurring in different places and different spaces was the theme of “shadow” and collective shadow. At the Integrales Forum Conference in Bremen, the theme of the collective German shadow kept reoccurring, often from the mouths of American teachers. This made me a little uncomfortable… as if we don’t have our own collective shadow. In my closing comments to the gathered assembly at the conference, I said as much. And also mentioned that with the election of Barack Obama, we have, as a nation, and perhaps as a world, taken a huge step in addressing that particular American shadow.

 I told the group that when I had been in Europe two years earlier, I had felt so amazed and proud of Europe’s accomplishments and was feeling very sad and depressed about my country, but how I was currently feeling much better. Everyone clapped. The world, at least Europe, loves Obama and is falling in love with the U.S. again. I’ve never seen the likes of it, except perhaps when I was a little boy living in Mexico. JFK was much beloved by the Mexicans, who seemed to be more devastated by his assassination than the Americans, according to my observations! 

Anyway, it is a heck of a thing. And the election of President Obama has made a huge difference. Still gives me goose bumps.

Back to the Shadow… I said in my closing remarks that we (Americans) certainly have our own shadow stuff, centering largely on slavery and racism and how we treated the native peoples of our land, but that really there was only one Shadow- and that your pain is my pain; your shadow is my shadow, and we truly are one. When I said this, there was a palpable surge of love and connection in the room. I ended my comments by saying that my current understanding of the Christian mystery is that we are called, like Christ, to take on this collective Shadow/sin and let it crucify us and kill us, so that we can resurrect as a transformed self with new wisdom and compassion to bring to the healing of our world. 

The theme of the collective shadow kept emerging and re-emerging in my talks with my close friend, German Integral leader Dennis Wittrock, with people I was working with, with spiritual teacher Thomas Huebl, Dr. Edda Gottschaldt, et al.

There is a huge shadow of suffering that has been handed down through the generations. And let me be clear, the perpetrators of WWII and the Nazi Holocaust are almost all gone or dead, but their sins and the sufferings they caused live on in those now living. So, whether your grandfather was an SS Storm Trooper or a concentration camp victim, the shadow and the suffering is passed on from generation to generation. 

While I was in Berlin, I was meditating one morning using the Holosync^TM level that I am currently on (Purification Level 4, CD 4, for the cognoscenti readers of this), and I began a descent into shadow that at first seemed to be my own stuff, but then became something much deeper and seemed to be connected with history and the current suffering of Berlin, which has been emerging lately, in many ways, as the creative heart of Europe. (An interesting historical footnote here is that in the Battle for Berlin, in May of 1945, almost 500,000 died, if one counts the German POW’s that were marched to the Soviet Union never to return. This number doesn’t include the wounded, the raped, those who died later from their wounds, the psychologically devastated, etc.) There I was in the former heart of the Nazi Empire tapping into some vast underground unconscious ocean of tremendous darkness and human suffering. I couldn’t even sit up, but lay on my back and felt pressed against the floor. I could barely breathe. My only prayer was, “God help me.” The darkness and the density of the suffering was way more than my individuated ego could hold. I kicked into Big Mind/ Big Heart with very little John left. I witnessed. I felt. I prayed. After two hours, which felt immensely longer, I came out of it. I went upstairs, where my hosts Helmut and Nadja were, and sat for a while before I could speak about what had transpired. 

What came out of the experience were several things (and as of this writing this is ongoing). First, I was left with an after-resonance of deep humility and felt somehow purified of my petty foibles and concerns. Secondly, I was left feeling deeply connected to humanity on the one hand, and God on the other. Silence and depth are the two words that come to mind. And the last was a sense that without this collective shadow confrontation, acceptance, and transmutation, we simply cannot heal and evolve as either a species or as individuals. Jung said, “God comes through our rejected parts.” The amazing thing is, that in the Shadow enormous energy for powerful transformation sleeps. It is splitting the psycho/spiritual atom. There is a tremendous reservoir of psychic potential energy that we are just sitting on. Untransmuted, it will kill us; transformed, it becomes the raw energy and power for positive evolution, creativity, compassion, healing, and hope of and for the future. 

I think this may be one of the essential spiritual Truths of our time: that in and through our shadow lies our hope, our essence, and our path to renaissance and healing. And more than this, I see this knowledge and understanding, as well as new techniques and technologies coming online all over the world, from many different and apparently independent sources, as indicative of something very real and powerful emerging for our time from our collective human consciousness. So, in spite of, or perhaps, in the face of, all of our catastrophic world problems, conditions and forecasts, there is light coming through the fissures and cracks. And somehow we can rest and work in the knowing, as the mystic Andrew Harvey writes, that “God also has an agenda…” and we do not labor alone in our darkness.

Practice, Damn It! Practice!

I am writing from the train station in Berlin, nearing the halfway mark in my month long trip to Germany. It seems like I have been gone from Utah much longer than 2 weeks. I have felt lonely at times, but the depths of the experience have more than compensated for the occasional bouts of homesickness, for my wife, my community, the wonder of the Wayne County landscape, and the dog that I don’t have Be that as it may, maybe I can share some of the impressions and learnings that I am seeing and processing. 

First, there seems to be too much talking about Integral Life Practice in Integral circles and not enough practicing. For about 4 years now, Integral Practice has become the axle that my life turns on. In other words it has become central—the center around which my life and work revolves—and it has made all the difference.

The core vision of the Integral revolution is to work body, mind, spirit, and emotions/shadow in an ongoing lifetime practice. This is where the rubber meets the road, where the transformation happens, where the Holy Grail is found, and where the Grail Knight Parsival’s koan is answered. “Whom does the Grail serve?” The Grail serves the healing of the world.

This leads to the next point: what is needed is a “culture of practice.” This culture of practice means that our lower left communion, just as our upper left and right quadrants do, centers around practice. When we are together, we hit the gym together and we sit/meditate together. (80 or 90% of the time using Holosync or some other binaural meditation technology. And if that disgruntles anyone, or the purists out there, I’m sorry. Do it for 6 months and then tell me I’m wrong.) When that is done, the conversations deepen, the love and connection deepens, meaning emerges, relationships become stronger and more translucent. We laugh more and we cry more. We are more profoundly human. In fact, this whole spiritual consciousness revolution has been brought about and sustained by those of our human family who had the courage and eye-of-the-tiger determination to practice and practice some more, didn’t stop until they got it, and then they practiced some more.

In my humble opinion, any conference or workshop that calls itself Integral and doesn’t feature space and time for the element of practice is missing the mark and shouldn’t call itself Integral. And how do we birth this culture of practice? BY PRACTICING TOGETHER! Try it—you will absolutely love it. The juice that makes life worth living is found in our depths, and our depths are accessed again and again by our ongoing practices that work our body, minds, hearts, and souls simultaneously. Individually we practice. Together we practice: with our friends, with our communities, with our sanghas, churches and temples, with our families we practice. Will this cure many of our individual and societal ills? I think it will.  Will it free us us from our life-destroying addictions, and unconscious compulsions? I believe it can. Will it keep our young people from becoming addicts? I think it will. Will it release the love and creativity we need to bring us into a future that is worth effort? I believe it can. And to quote that guy who is making waves and spreading viral hope… “Yes we can!”

The Buddha Didn’t Need no Stinkin’ Holosync®

I wanted to write a few words about the use of binaural brain entrainment technology (specifically Holosync® technology) for enhanced meditation, shadow work, and brain transformation. There seems to be some controversy, albeit small controversy, regarding its use. There’s the argument that goes something like this: Well, Buddha didn’t have Holosync®, which makes using Holosync® seem like cheating. There is also the idea that perhaps Holosync® is addictive. Or, there is the argument that if you use Holosync® to achieve very profound brainwave states, it’s not natural; you should be able to do it on your own.

To the first argument, I would say that the Buddha probably didn’t use 97% of the technologies that we use today. Okay. However, seeing that the main purpose, or the heart, of Buddhism is the liberation of all sentient beings from suffering, I believe that the Buddha would celebrate this technology that is helping to heal and awaken so many.

Bill Harris, founder of Holosync® and Centerpointe Institute, recently told me that transmitted Zen master Genpo Roshi is having his new students use Holosync® for a year before they even attempt koans. My experience with my own awakening process and what I see with the clients I work with is simply off the charts. Holosync® not only deepens the spiritual capacity—it is also extremely effective in helping people to heal and release life-crippling, psychological traumas, as well as increasing cognitive intelligence, rebalancing brain chemistry, etc., etc.

The mission of Integral Recovery is to heal and awaken. And this powerful technology is doing just that to a degree that I wouldn’t have formerly believed possible. I was recently asked in a talk if Holosync® is addictive or not. I answered no, it is still a practice and I have to discipline myself to do it. In fact, the morning after that question was asked, I sat in profound pain and darkness for an hour and a half during my morning Holosync®-assisted meditation. Sometimes it feels great, and other times you’re dealing with shadow, suffering, and darkness, all of which have a profound part in the Integral spiritual journey.

Another of the extraordinary things about using brain entrainment technology with meditation, which I have found in myself and heard reported by others, is that even when not using the technology, the Holosync® practitioner is able to access deep meditative states. I was recently at a workshop, sitting in silent meditation with a group of practitioners, and almost immediately was able to access a deep state of Samadhi, or open spaciousness, that was filled with absolute bliss and serenity.

Having said that, let me say there are two ways Holosync® can be used: the lazy way and the disciplined way. I tend toward the disciplined and really work the deep meditative states of consciousness that Holosync® makes available to me. Others (whom I know well) do the lazy version. They will listen to Holosync® and answer their e-mails. That just doesn’t seem right. However, I notice that these people still get profound benefits from doing this type of so-called practice! So, it seems to be kind of idiot proof. Just do it, as the shoe company says.

Sometimes, when I’m really tired and exhausted, I’ll just lay down and put the headphones on and let her rip. But usually, after 45 minutes or an hour of this, I find myself waking up again, becoming alert, and I sit up refreshed and continue to practice.

So, what I’m saying here is that if you do the lazy person’s version, or the dedicated practitioner’s version, or some mix of both, you’re still going to have very powerful and often amazing results. And as you continue to practice and transform your brain to function at a higher level, your traditional meditation experiences will also be much more profound.

I love you all.

Let me know how it works for you.

Sitting in the Fire

Here is a technique that I have been using for over three years in my personal work and also shared with clients and students and watched them use it with great success. I call it “Sitting in the Fire.” While I arrived at this technique semi-independently, I have found similar examples of this particular method blossoming all over the world and it is certainly echoed in ancient meditative and contemplative traditions. This makes me feel that I am in some way connected to a larger field of conscious emergence, and that feels pretty good.

I won’t get into a scholarly diatribe on the different versions of this technique, but will focus on the technique itself. (Okay, I’ll name a few: Buddhism, Contemplative Christianity, Christian Meyer, The Sedona Method, Ken Wilber, et al. I hope I didn’t miss anyone. Love you all.)

Let me give a simple, hypothetical example of how this works. A client contacts me and says they are really stuck or suffering anxiety, fear, depression, whatever, related to such and such a thing that happened. I instruct them using Holosync™ or an equivalent technology (if you have no clue what I’m talking about here, go to my website at www.integralrecovery.com) to go inside and look at the feeling, the hurt, identify the thought, let go of the thoughts associated with the feeling, as focusing on the thoughts and the associated feelings will only keep you stuck, and stick with the feelings for at least two hours while doing the binaural Holosync™ meditation. If you are using Holosync™, do the first half hour track (the Dive) once and the second half hour track 3 times for a total of two hours (I’ve been known to do it longer in my personal work, but I’m sort of a meditation marathoner). As Christian Meyer told me, “You don’t have to do anything with the feeling, just let the feeling do whatever it wants.”

You can actually watch your typical ego-defense mechanisms try to do their thing, such as rationalizing the hurt, pushing it away, projecting it out on others, or craving some nacoticizing strategy such as drugs, alcohol, sex, work, or TV, or whatever version/s thereof you employ. The practice is just to keep breathing into the feeling, welcoming it, even with gratitude, and eventually it will start to shift and transmute into something better, deeper, higher.

In place of monkey mind, we find stillness and spaciousness; instead of hatred, compassion; instead of fear, faith; instead of anxiety, peace; instead of depression and darkness, the penetrating light of God. And remarkably, there almost always arises a deeper understanding and a new transformed narrative that can best be described as a deeper wisdom.

I know that this same technique will also work without Holosync™, but Holosync™ just seems to get you out of the little league into the majors so much more quickly. And that, my friends, is the goal of Integral Recovery and all true spiritual practice: to alleviate needless suffering and enlighten the self. Try it. Let me know how it goes.