Home » Science » Psychology (Page 6)

Category Archives: Psychology

Dawn of the Soul

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Midi Berry’s newly published Nights of the Road examines the mystical power of feminine devotion. The nominal protagonist of the tale is Sarah, a British refugee from bad relationship mojo, taking up a life as a psychotherapist in Los Angeles. The power driving her spiritual awakening, however, arises from the 17th century, where her ancestor Frances Coke earns the regard of those surrounding the Stewart court as its excesses succumb to Parliamentary discipline.

When I was a child, my father declaimed modern music by observing that it was the discipline of classical forms that allowed composers to create pieces that challenged listeners without alienating them. This seems a suitable metaphor for the structure of Midi’s work.

In both time streams, Berry injects the theme of a woman committed to a natural love with a devoted partner, but challenged in her course by the passionate attentions of an unstable and possessive creative genius. In the Stewart Court, Frances is frustrated in her love by an arranged marriage, albeit to a man who – as long as the forms of the relationship are honored – kindly accepts her devotion to another. In modern Los Angeles, Sarah escapes a political marriage through emigration, and falls captive to the reborn creative genius whose attentions were frustrated by social strictures in the Stewart Court.

The novel evolves through a series of tetes-a-tetes between the romantic interests. Sarah employs the language of modern psychology as a shield against strong emotions, eventually drawing her two competitors – both previously members of a band called Nights of the Road (whence the title, in part) – into collaborative reconciliation. As for Frances, I found myself thinking that her attitudes were entirely too modern, but then realized that so were the attitudes of Beethoven and Brahms. Frances makes a decision early on in the book to believe in herself, and thus speaks her mind honestly throughout, and so perhaps reveals wisdom of the feminine heart that has been long suppressed.

I found myself at times wishing that Berry would bring us into some of the historical experiences discussed by Frances and her lover Robert. However, the emphasis of the book is on transformation of relationships, and there is a lot of valuable relationship modeling in the story line.

The most significant flaw in the story – and this is nit-picking – may be the lack of forecasting of Frances’s mystical ascension as her death nears. For those familiar with such events, this is foreshadowed by the affirmation by a noble protector that Frances’s beauty, compassion and devotion have brought her unsuspected admiration from the royal entourage. Unfortunately, for some the connection may be lost, and so her wandering down the psychic road as she nears death (whence again the title) may seem a little jarring, if not deus ex machina.

But the book’s final chapter is golden. Antony, the creative genius of Nights of the Road, manipulates masterfully Sarah’s emotions, and precious are the lyrics sung as reflections upon her impact on the men that love her.

Berry’s heart-felt tribute to reconciliation and redemption casts light on the challenges of being a muse, and presents wisdom that readers will usefully apply when seeking to understand and deepen their relationships. As the Brits would say: “Give it a go!”

You-Say-I-Am

Posted on by | Leave a comment

In the last week of his life on Earth, Jesus brought his verbal sparring match to Jerusalem, where was gathered the authorities of his age. Welcomed enthusiastically by crowds expecting him to transform their political and religious reality, Jesus instead proclaims the kingdom of heaven and his impending destruction.

Sensing weakness, the temple priests swoop in for the kill. Perhaps advised by spies that Jesus had been proclaimed the Son of God, and certainly with the evidence of his tirade in the temple, they summon him to pose the question directly: Is he the Messiah, the “King of the Jews?” However, if they thought that Jesus was on the ropes intellectually, they were mistaken. For in answer to their questions, and the questions of Pilate and Herod, he simply answers “You say I am.”

The Gospels give us no punctuation for this statement, and so it is generally read passively, without emotion. But we cannot imagine Jesus without emotion in this moment, not given the throes of passion just evidenced in the Garden of Gethsemane. There must have been something there, besides simple resignation.

So what would the emotion have been? That of the man pleading “Father, take this cup away from me!” – a petulant “You say I am.” That is to observe “Would you face the consequences of that admission? Then why do you expect me to say it?”

No, Jesus was a man of greater heart than that. Perhaps, then, it was “You say I am!” The proof of the statement was in their actions, this desperate attempt to preempt the rallying of the people to him after his non-violent provocations against their authority. If they did nothing, he would indeed become king, a king brought to authority by God, rather than by human methods.

Or was it a prophetic proclamation? As David had proclaimed his suffering twenty generations before, was Jesus merely observing to Pilate, “You say I am!” The ultimate authority of Rome, the Emperor himself, will one day proclaim Christ the Lord!

But there is another thread, the thread that starts with Israel being told “I am that I am”, and continuing with the challenge to Peter “Who do you say I am?” It is the prompting of God through the ages that beseeches us to trust our hearts – to hear the still, quiet voice that Samuel counseled the Israelites to rely upon over the institutions of men. It is a voice of hope, still hoping against hope that the pain and suffering could be avoided. Not just the endurance of the cross, but all the religious wars, the starving children, the women demonized and abused for sexual gratification, and the wasted words of political dispute when only compassion can light the road to justice.

It is the hope of rejoining human institutions to the divine purpose.

It is to encourage:

You! Say I am!

Are we prepared to do that now? Not just if he came down in glory – but if he came as he did before, a man with all the frailties of flesh. Would he be recognized? And if not, why would he return?

Only to die again?

Healing Dissension

Posted on by | 2 Comments

In the weary journey that has been this life, I have come to accept that we cannot end sin by trying to destroy the impulses that trigger it. That simply justifies their behavior. So Jesus counsels us [NIV Matt. 5:9]:

But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.

So I have sought to join the vices to love. That strategy was held out in All the Vice of Jesus. I was pretty satisfied with my progress, and had turned my thoughts from the matter until I realized that Dissension was still at work in my life.

She kept me up all last night, from 12:30 until I rose at 6:45. Competition and fear at work, the cry of “Anti-Semitism” against the reasons for Jesus’s demotion of the Law of Moses, old family history and recent family struggle: they rolled through my mind, one after another, sometimes mixing into toxic stew, and I found myself simply reiterating: “I have so much else to be concerned with! What right do you have to burden me with these trivial complaints that are your responsibilities?”

So I lost that round. I allowed dissension to separate me from those that I seek to love and inspire.

I think of dissension as “she” because I have learned that Mystery, the woman on the red beast in Rev. 17:5, uses it as a favorite tool. Whether in debasing my relationships with younger women by imposing sex or in undermining collaboration with other men, Mystery (I could name the women, but that would be counter-productive) has inserted dissension again as an obstacle to my goals.

When things got really bad at work, I found this piece of wisdom about dealing with conflict, the goal of all dissension:

Find a mutually beneficial solution.
Adapt to surroundings.
Don’t share all your secrets.
Stand up for your dreams.
Sometimes you need to move on.

It’s that last that has come to disturb me: surrender. I have found it to be an effective solution, but a consequence has been that I haven’t been able to build upon the foundations I establish at work and home. Domineering people walk off with them.

There’s another method: dissension justifies the projection of our egos. If we don’t participate, and accept that projection without responding to its harmful intent, people become enmeshed in our love. Eventually they may realize that we can do more together than we can as individuals.

But then comes Mystery again: the quiet lurker in the backwaters of our minds who gains power by picking up the gold that dissension scatters. As we learn to work together, she’s frozen out, and the volume and intensity of her projections goes up.

Is that what I’m dealing with? The last hurrah of Mystery?

That doesn’t seem satisfying. I’d like to redeem her.

So let’s consider: if dissension motivates us to assert our egos in destructive competition, perhaps with love it becomes celebration of our differences? Maybe the answer to a charge of ill intent is to insert, at the top of the list:

Celebrate your opponent’s virtues.

Taking Up the Cross

Posted on by | Leave a comment

While Christianity is filled with joy in the certainty of Jesus’s promises, those promises are balanced with assurances that we will face suffering. In fact, suffering seems to be tendered as a condition of our Christianity, for Jesus says [NIV Matt. 16:24]

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

It’s hard to avoid the impression that if we don’t find a cross to carry, we can’t call ourselves a disciple of Christ.

Now the obvious thing about the cross is the pain involved. But if the experience of pain was a condition of grace, Jesus would have come into the world a cripple, and shown us how to overcome that deficit. And to be healed would be contrary to grace, rather than an act to be celebrated – as Jesus so joyfully did – as a demonstration of great faith.

So we should be cautious against ascribing a long illness as a cross to bear, nor a difficult relationship or financial challenges. Jesus presented us another tool to use in overcoming those difficulties: an openness to the unconditional love tendered from the divine source, and a sharing of its riches with those around us. It was a message of truth that both revealed our nature, and the grace of the relationship that God seeks to share with us.

It is this observation that leads us into an understanding of the metaphor as Jesus offered it. The cross was not just the place of suffering – it was a tool wielded by the rulers of the age to prevent Jesus from sharing his message. Those authorities achieved their position largely through fear. In the case of the Romans and Herod, it was fear through threat of violence. In the case of the Temple priests, it was fear gained through the threat of spiritual corruption.

To take up the cross, then, is to offer the world the experience of our love, and to be harmed by those who use fear to control those to whom we offer hope. It is to speak truth to power, to do it joyfully, and to make courage born of faith a demonstration of the weakness of our persecutors.

There is no place in which it is more important to do this than in our churches. Consider: the only direct assault Jesus mounted against the rulers of his age was against the money changers in the Temple – the intermediaries that profited by standing between the faithful and the healing love of God.

So do not make too much, fellow Christians, of finding that we have pain in our lives. That is not what qualifies us in the eyes of Jesus. We find certain grace as Christians only when our pain serves to overcome the institutions that stand against love: either the perfect love of God, or the love that we offer each other.

The Standard of Truth

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I first read F. Scott Peck, the psychologist and Christian philosopher, back in college. (Ouch! Was that really 1984?) The Road Less Traveled crystalized the wisdom he gained in trying to balance the scientific practices of one-on-one therapy with the creation of networks of support that enabled healing to become a practical way of living for the patient.

One of the greatest causes of psychological distress, as well as the greatest impediment to healing, was the simple confusion that “love” was something that the giver felt. Peck completely rejected this in the case of the confusing loss of ego boundaries that we know as romantic love, applying to this particular form of madness the technical term “cathecting.” That’s close enough to “catheter” that I find it almost repulsive.

Peck’s writing sent me off down a path of rational loving that is just terribly confusing to most people. I don’t expect to feel good when loving somebody until my love actually manifests itself in a way that means something to them. I know that I’ve succeeded in that process when they come and say “Thank-you for loving me.” Ultimately, that’s the only meaningful evidence of my love. I do still offer “I love you” to my intimates, because it’s a comforting token, but I know full well that it doesn’t give me any claim on them until they give me “thank-you” back.

The most awe-inspiring part of this process is the depth to which people reveal themselves, and the tenderness of the engagement. The experience is very much like the “cathecting” that Peck described: it’s a deep surrender of ego. It’s different, however, because I’m not projecting myself into them. I’m actually acting as a doorway of sorts, and on the other side of the doorway is God. In looking into them, I’m simply showing them how I accept God, and letting them use that as an example for their own acceptance.

This is the source of the confusion, particularly to women of child-bearing age. They think that they’re falling in love with me, when in fact what they’re falling in love with is the source of perfect, infinite, unconditional love that reaches out to them through me.

That divine love is the love that forgave Cain, the first son, for the murder of Abel, the second son. It is a love that knows no rules, no boundaries. It is the love that manifested itself on the cross in the ultimate act of forgiveness.

Are rules imposed upon us in this relationship? Only one: to humbly accept that our love can never be so perfect, and thus to surrender ourselves as the conduit through which that love flows to others.

Is that hard? Yes, it’s hard. It’s really, really hard. The reason is that, after we’ve all broken down our egos and learned to offer our hearts up in service to one another, we still have to figure out how to stay alive in this world long enough to make some progress in healing it. That means deciding what we’re going to do, and often it really doesn’t make a difference, in the big picture, whether we eat Chinese or Mexican take-out tonight. But if we all say “you choose”, then nothing ever happens. And if we always insist on making ourselves happy, then our partners will eventually get tired of never having their preferences honored.

The example might seem silly, but when you’ve got a two-career family, and job offers in two states, the decisions become more difficult and painful to resolve.

And so we look for rules – something hard and fast from God that will help us prioritize. In Judaism, those rules were pretty much designed for men (which I interpret as reflecting our weakness). Rules provide structure, and can be a useful spiritual tool. We simply stop investing our egos in practical matters, and move on to spiritual ones.

But the New Testament is about creating people that live outside of the rules, and Acts demonstrates Jesus’s success in that endeavor. After the healing of a cripple, the Sanhedrin throw Peter and John in jail, but eventually are forced to relent, because, as the Scripture says [NIV Acts 4:13-14]:

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. But since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there was nothing they could say.

And so this brings me to the point of this message: the standard of truth, as Jesus always said, is the faith that gives you the courage to give and receive healing. Remember, Jesus never, ever said “I have healed you” – he always said “Your faith has healed you.” Divine love can reach out through us, but unless the target of that love accepts it, no benefit will come.

So believe in what heals you. Allow others to take comfort in the healing that their faith brings to them. And open your heart to each other so that the truth of your healing can be seen to all. For that is the testament that Christ begs for the world to see: not a labored adherence to rules and conditions, but a joyous revival of truth, hope and life in those that once suffered with lies, fear and death.

And you ministers: if you can’t offer the kind of healing described in Acts, please humble your egos to the ultimate authority when your congregants tell you that the rules don’t work for them. Just agree that they need to find a spiritual home elsewhere, and part without prejudicial words on either side.

And for those ministers with the courage to recognize that you have guided your congregation through experiences that have moved them beyond the need for rules: Well: “God Bless You!” and “Welcome to the Journey!”

Why God Comes First

Posted on by | 2 Comments

To the skeptic, holding out the hope that prayer will bring divine guidance is to become a “meat puppet.” This is unfair for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that smart predators make life a lot more complicated for us that it should be. Sometimes we just run out of thoughts at the end of the day, and it’s nice to have other sources of insight to fall back on.

In trying to find a balance here, the pronouncements made by Jesus on the road to Jerusalem can be troubling. They include Luke 9:60 and 62:

Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.

No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.

but most distressingly is Matthew 10:37:

Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.

Does this God sound a little needy to you?

We can certainly interpret those quotes from that point of view, but think of it from the other direction. Let’s say that it was your father demanding that he come before your relationship with Christ, the one that tenders to you a perfect, healing love. Would a father that loved you deny you that gift?

And if your father already possessed that gift, would he not want to purify and refine it so that he could share it to its fullest with you? In fact, would he not believe that it was in fact his walk in the presence of that perfect love that empowered him to love you? When you walk into that space of love the he has called to him, all the hurts and pains of the past fall away, and he sees you exactly as you are, and offers you only those things that will make you stronger.

In “My Father’s Eyes”, Eric Clapton shares this experience of nurturing a child:

Where do I find the words to say?
How do I teach him?
What do we play?
Bit by bit, I’ve realized
That’s when I need them,
That’s when I need my father’s eyes.

From this point of view, the reason that Jesus asks us to put him first is because when we do that we become better able to bring his love to others, and that also makes us better at loving them. As with the servants in the parable of the talents, this is what makes us worthy of Jesus: not to hoard his love, but to give it to those around us that need it most with the faith that they will return it to us in our time of need.

So what this leads us to is this: when we fail to put love (which is Christ) first in our relationships, we not only become unworthy of Christ, but we become unworthy of those that we claim to love. In fact, we are lying to them when we say “I love you.”

Call Me Crazy

Posted on by | 4 Comments

In The Soul Comes First, I suggest that the only way to make sense of the Bible is to think of this reality as a place of healing for wounded souls. That was something that we were originally meant to do as innocents in Eden. Given our tendency to wonder “Why?” (which is really what got Eve into trouble), it was perhaps unavoidable that we would wander from that role, and end up serving that purpose only after graduating from the school of hard knocks.

In science, the discipline that most directly deals with these issues is psychiatry. From Wikipedia, we have the definition “Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders.” It has two sub-disciplines: psychiatric medicine and psychotherapy.

I am not going to survey the complex social issues of modern psychiatric practice. Our friend at Taking the Mask Off surveys many of the disconnects between drug-based therapy under DSM guidelines and actual human needs. What I can offer, however, is an attempt to trace the source of the disconnect.

The root is in the mechanistic model of the mind. This is the idea that our minds – the seat of our intelligence and consciousness – can be explained fully through study of the brain. This is based upon the success of neurophysiologists in explaining the behavior of simple organisms (such as worms), and the correlation between damage to human brains and loss of function.

In On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins of the Redwood Neuroscience Institute explored the challenges of explaining adaptive behavior using the mechanistic model of the brain. The Institute has put together some simple paper-doll cutting illustrations of these methods. However, my assessment was that the scaling was simply not going to work. When Jeff came to speak at my place of employment in 2005, I offered to him “Maybe the brain is a time-travel device, and you’re focusing on how it works looking into the past.” That thesis is the only way I have of explaining my personal experiences of precognition.

As for the correlation between brain damage and loss of function: correlation does not imply causation. If our creative intelligence and consciousness resides in a soul, and the brain is the interface to that soul, then damage to the brain will result in loss of function because the exchange of information with the soul is cut off.

The “fuzzy” side of psychiatry was recognized by many of its original practitioners (including Jung), and we can still find recent testimony on the matter. A great example is A General Theory of Love, by Lewis, et al. In that work, the therapeutic process is summarized as follows: the therapist walks the patient up to the moment of their trauma, and suggests “No, go this way instead.” As they testify, the two most important factors in therapeutic success are the moral clarity and courage of the therapist. If either fail, then the therapist becomes trapped in the patient’s trauma.

The connection to the problems described in The Soul Comes First can be found in F. Scott Peck’s Glimpses of the Devil and Father Amorth’s An Exorcist Tells His Tale.

Peck was a world-renowned theorist of applied morality and a practicing therapist. He was conned by a priest into accepting two patients with severe psychological disorders. As the relationship developed, Peck was driven inescapably to the conclusion that the disorders were caused by possession. The final course of treatment, in both cases, was exorcism.

Father Amorth was a Catholic exorcist who was alarmed that the Church has accepted the psychiatric models of personality disorders, and has therefore left its flock unprepared to manage spiritual infestation. He documents a lifetime of experiences that defy explanation using modern theories of physics.

Psychiatric medication is the alternative for those seeking to avoid such confrontations. It isolates and shuts down the neural pathways that are triggered by defective souls (whether damaged or infested) to generate antisocial and self-destructive behaviors. The problem is that it doesn’t address the root cause: the defective souls survive, and simply go about seeking strength to exercise their will through other pathways.

In my own experience, I have found that faith in Divine Love allows me to navigate waters that terrify professionals. I find that most destructive personalities are simply doing what was done to them in the hope of discovering someone who can show them how to survive their experience. What I share with them is my experience in opening my heart to the source of my pain until they are bathed in the divine source.

In my New Year’s message, I said that we find compassion, creativity and courage when we share the divine presence with each other. I believe that this addresses the limitations described by Lewis: the practitioner is not responsible for overcoming the evil experienced by the patient, but only for making the power of healing available to them. Both Amorth’s and Peck’s experience substantiate this truth.

Ma

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Seeking an avenue to express my admiration of women, in October of 2013 I laid it all out in 140 pages.

One of the more culturally sophisticated commentators decided that I was the “Thomas Pynchon” at my current place of employment. I didn’t mean for the book to be inscrutable. I meant for it to be about the deep creative emotions that become our passions. But in exposing myself in that regard, all the complexity of my concerns for the future were mashed together in a narrative that is probably impenetrable to understanding.

I hope that you read it with your heart open.

There’s several aspects to the impenetrability of Ma. First is the complexity of the social forces that propel the characters across time and space. The principle male protagonist, Corin, summarizes the history of human nature and its current condition in four pages. On the planet of Trialle, his father, Erendur/Random, surveys his collaboration with Zenica (the “Ma” of the title) in empowering spiritual maturation using mystical technologies. This is all set against the backdrop of an interstellar competition between two communities – Random’s “Order” and Corin’s “Friendship” – to spread peace throughout the galaxy. The process is endangered by a predatory cabal within the former.

As if this wasn’t enough of a challenge, the characters are entrained deeply in mystical experience. This means that internal and external worlds mesh. Those transitions aren’t always clearly defined in the narrative. We can be sitting in a shrine in Guandong one paragraph, and then in the next shift 200 million years into the mind of a saurian raptor. We do have Leelay, a woman of the Congo who represents Life, to lead us into that aspect of experience as she developers her strength. But, as a neophyte, she doesn’t have the terminology to explain the process, so much is left to inference by the reader.

I was conscious of this complexity, but believed that it didn’t really matter. Most of us struggle through life against forces beyond our control and understanding. We seek and cling to relationships that provide us assurance of mutual support. I find incredible beauty and surprising power in those human emotions and loyalties. While it is indeed possible to make sense of Ma’s back story (it’s all based upon the model of physics that I laid out in the generative orders research proposal), I hoped that people would realize that they weren’t supposed to understand it all, and focus on the relationships.

The key to the relationships is in the first chapter. The opening scene relates Corin’s traumatic separation from his mother, and I tried to manifest its consequences in the hotel room when Corin wakes up next to Leelay, the stranger that will become his soul-mate. The choices made by Zenica – choices driven by her immersion in the process of trying to love worlds full of people – left deep wounds in the intimates that she was trying to protect. They struggle against transferring that pain to others, and fail. Inspired by her service to others, they deny their own needs, and simply compound their loss.

I say that the book is a celebration of women, and it is in the hidden workings of the title character, a woman that until the final pages does not appear explicitly in the book except in memory, that I indulge my amazement in them. Zenica appears incongruously in the thoughts of her men throughout the book, reflecting her intervention, from her place of mystical sanctuary, in guiding them to healing and love.

Recognizing that in Ma I impose on the endurance of the reader’s compassion (I did try to put some bright moments in before the end!), I’m now working on a sequel that makes explicit, in reflection, many of the hidden forces that propel the characters. Then again, that exploration requires an elaboration of detail that has blossomed into a host of new characters and experiences. I’m having a lot of fun with it.

The Body-Mind Connection

Posted on by | Leave a comment

When I started my current job at age forty-eight, I was just beginning to get heavy on my chest and abdomen. The primary impact on a software developer is lower back pain that steals the last two hours of the work day. I ran a few miles a week and played tennis with my sons on the weekend, but I could see myself starting the long, slow slide into flabbiness.

The general manager at the company was in far worse shape, having decided to take up golf for exercise. After ruining his back with all that hyperextended twisting, he decided to bring in a yoga instructor. I took a few classes with her, but with zero-period drop-offs for the son that was taking AP chemistry, I couldn’t make more than one session a week.

My introduction to Bikram Yoga was incidental – the studio is next door to the music shop where I took flute lessons until last month.

At this point, I can’t say enough about the discipline. To tell the truth, though, starting it at age fifty was really hell. I was riddled with tissue and joint alignments that had evolved to support my defective posture. Then there were the untreated stress injuries and left-right muscle imbalance from basketball and tennis. I’m also a long string bean, and was just really embarrassed to collapse half-way through the balancing poses held by all the little 5’2” ladies. Finally, I’m a walking bog monster: I drop ten pounds of water weight over the ninety minutes in the heated room.

So I was a train wreck for the first eighteen months. Between aggravating my stress injuries by straining too far in the poses, to just collapsing in the heat, I really drove the studio owners crazy. I still remember the first time I really compressed my gut in wind-removing pose. After the twenty-second squeeze, I uncurled to lie in corpse pose, and I could feel my body reeling as fat was released into my blood stream. Yuck!

Along with the physical challenges were some serious psychological challenges. I’m a really open and supportive person, and there are predators that come into a collective effort like group yoga and just suck energy out of people like me. Some of them don’t realize what they’re doing: they’re just hypercompetitive people that have always taken energy out of others in accomplishing their goals. Some of them are fully conscious of their abuse of people that they consider to be weak-willed. And some are just struggling with the discipline of staying in a heated room while exercising at the limits of the ability. After learning to recognize and reclaim my energies from the first two groups, most of the second year was spent learning to manage the last group. I put a lot of thoughts like “Breathe”, “Just rest” and “It’s OK. Do the best that you can” into the room. Every now and then someone comes up after class to thank me.

Some of the experiences I don’t even know how to categorize. The most intense was when lying down after an deep back bend on the floor. I felt a spark, pretty much like an electric spark from finger to metal, emanating from my liver. Everybody in the class froze, and the teacher stopped and asked “Is everything OK, Brian?”

This last year has been about building strength in the left side of my body. As I got closer and closer to balancing out the poses, I was overwhelmed by feelings of intense loss and sadness. Sometimes those feelings seemed to be related to having a specific person or persons in my vicinity, but I eventually realized that they were coming from somewhere deep inside of me.

I was exhausted last Tuesday just coming into class, and spent the first half of the floor series trying to catch my breath. The sadness was powerful, and I had to hold my breath to keep from sobbing. I finally got back into the postures, focusing this time on the left side of my neck and upper back. Suddenly, I had an amazing sensation, as though the right side of my head was filling up with energy.

I mentioned that I have a spiritual tenant on my right shoulder, something that was waiting for me in my mother’s womb following a six-month miscarriage. I realized that I had forced him out of my mind. He was a little upset, but resigned. The intensity of focus I had invested in activating the muscles on the left side of my body had worked back into the right side of my brain (the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body).

The impressions that I drew from him, regarding the sadness I had been struggling with, were related to memories of the agony he had suffered as his little fetus succumbed to death. Honoring the sacrifice that he had made, I spent the rest of class working out how to supply him energy without renouncing the right side of my brain.

What’s been amazing is the impact on my relationships. I’ve been seized by fear of rejection all my life. That’s evaporated. And the people that rely upon emotional connections to drive their relationships no longer find me to be so needy.

Of course, it’s not just me and my tenant in this situation. One of the things that I’m conscious of is that predators consider humility to be a form of weakness. I’ve been letting a certain class of them get twisted up in the right side of my mind. It’s time to infect them with the strength that comes from loving.

On Dying

Posted on by | 2 Comments

When I sat down with the pastor at St. Maximillian’s to discuss my spiritual journey, the pitch was pretty blunt: “Tell me, Brian, do you want to die, or live forever?”

Today, I have arrows in my quiver that I didn’t have then. “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” [Matt. 16:25] Not that I wasn’t concerned about survival then, but that concern was overshadowed by incredibly powerful dreams. I needed somebody to help me sort through them, so the response he got back was a disappointed stare.

Now I didn’t expect to die, so the sense in which I was losing my life at that time was that held by most people reading Jesus’s words. My way of living was being consumed by powerful forces that I could not overcome with force. The only weapon that I had was my heart. I was committed to surrendering myself to loving, no matter the cost.

But in an earlier era, most people would have taken those words as a literal pronouncement: those that perish for me will find life. Certainly death was part of the early Christian experience, with thousands of martyrs to the faith. But how is that “for Christ”?

We celebrate sacrificial nobility in those that died in combat securing our freedom. That was perhaps also the understanding of those that died fighting for the faith during the Crusades and other Christian wars. But how does that square with the first part: “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it”? Doesn’t every warrior wish to return to home and family?

Christ died on the cross to bring perfect love into the world. In Matt. 10-38, he admonishes “…he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” From this, it seems clear that to die for Jesus is dying to bring love into the world. That is hard, because the only reason that our lives are not filled with love is because we chose, of our own will, to reject it. Why would we do that? Because we’re infected with a disease called selfishness.

Look at what Jesus did on the cross: he submitted to the religious and secular authorities of his age. They forced their wills upon him, and he did not resist. Because of that, they became stuck in his compassion. He infected them with the seeds of loving.

Obviously, that is taking a great long time to work itself out. But the message is that dying is nothing to fear, at least so long as the manner of our dying is to bring love into the world.

Now Jesus’s surrender to evil was obvious and dramatic, involving public orations and processions. Very few people in Jerusalem would have been unaware. For most of us, taking up the cross is a lonely, silent affair. We don’t wrestle with Satan in all his power, we wrestle with petty evil in spouses and bosses, employees and rapists. That can have its toll on us. A family member once shared an anecdote about a visit with a rich business partner, a man that took his children up to the top of a building to throw paper airplanes down into the streets in violation of a sign that said “Do not throw paper airplanes.” (Think about it: would you go out of your way to do that?) This was a pattern in his business dealings as well. His wife was a twisted crone, beaten down by the burden of the anger that the world had mounted against her husband.

How long should we struggle against the burden of others’ sin? Only so long as we can face it without falling into fear. Trying to live with uncontrollable pain is heroic until we lose our heroism. Then it becomes a slow cancerous submission of our souls to evil.

Is there hope? Always, but Jesus offers the guarantee this way: “whoever loses his life for me will find it.” Jesus could have chosen to hang on the cross in suffering, suffer into eternity. But he did not because he knew that another life awaited him. He knew that to attain that life he needed to surrender his body.

Thus it is with those that suffer pain in this world, pain brought on by their sin and the sins of others. They need to lose their bodies to selfishness, to let it wind itself into their flesh, and then to escape into death, purified in spirit as was Jesus. It is thus that we weaken evil by trapping it in decaying matter, and free those portions of our soul into loving as are willing to accept love.

So when you pronounce against death, remember that death was Jesus’s tool of choice. Look into the soul of the person dying, and do not push them past their ability to endure. Do not block that moment of release, lest you stretch it into a torment of possession.

Rather, send them off with that most tender of incantations: “S(he) has gone to a better world.” With that little push too empower them, perhaps they’ll be motivated to look back in time when they get there, and reach out to pull us through behind them.