Angry Little Boy

There's this

angry little boy

inside, somewhere next to my spine

and sometimes he sneaks out

like smog

around the corners of the eyes

maybe its in the vow of nonviolence to myself

that i'll have to let it go

because wanting

begets the little scared boy

because this wanting mind will

leave me in pain

this

bruise

on

my hip

this

bruise

on my

heart

Basic goodness

“O Nobly Born, O you of glorious origins, remember your radiant true nature, the essence of mind. Trust it. Return to it. It is home.”
- The Tibetan Book of the Dead

The concept of “basic goodness” is a thread through many of the spiritual traditions of the world, but until recently, I only understood it on a very superficial, intellectual level. Yes, I comprehended the idea that everyone is supposed to be basically good – that at the core of our being, regardless of all of the terrible and neurotic things we do, we have a good centre. For someone who adopted at a very early age the idea that my core identity was that of a sinner, it's refreshing to explore a contrary view. Basic goodness, as opposed to the old concepts of original sin staining us – wicked at a deep level – is an idea that is becoming more popular even in the Christian tradition: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, has written extensively on how we are basically good creatures and made in God's image.

And yet, we do some really awful things, to ourselves and to each other. We kill each other, we wage war, we rape, we molest and abuse each other. We are addicts, seeking out temporary relief from shame through any number of behaviours which have long-term negative consequences - and yet we continue to pursue them, overeating, overshopping, overusing in a ravenous attempt to find transient comfort. It's easy on some level to understand why the Christian tradition has understood and in many cases continues to see human beings as totally depraved and in need of external salvation.

Humans really suck sometimes.

Still, there is another vision of human nature. For example, in the Buddhist tradition, a central notion is the inherent nobility of each person – we are all “nobly born,” as the Tibetan Book of the Dead puts it - and heirs to the Buddha within. What opened the door for me to understand this concept at a heart level was this quotation by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, a nondual Hindu teacher:

“You are perfect, only you don’t know it.

Learn to know yourself and you will discover wonders.

All you need is already within you, only you must approach yourself with reverence and love.

Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors.

Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of the love you bear for yourself;

all I plead with you is this: make love of yourself perfect.

Deny yourself nothing – give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that

you do not need them; you are beyond.”

What I took from this was a sense of the simple purity that lies at the core of our being. We want what is best for ourselves – we are constantly shying away from pain and seeking out pleasure. Even a hurtful or addictive behaviour originates from a place of love for the self, which gets contorted so that we seek out comfort in harmful ways. Perhaps even the cruelest forms of self-hatred come from a twisted sort of desire to be better – the irrational logic of punishing ourselves until we become good.

When we start to understand our own basic goodness, it causes a shift in how we see everyone around us. Every other person is acting out of this same, simple, pure impulse to seek comfort and avoid discomfort. Overtop of that impulse is a thick layer of conditioning which torques our inner love towards trying to find satisfaction in all the things which can't ever truly satisfy. We will never find true peace when we cling to the temporary things of the world.

At the heart of each person is the same essence of wanting to be happy – a wish that is so simple and profound that it can be understood as divine. As Thomas Merton said, if we really truly understood who we are, we would “fall down and worship each other.” At the core of who we are – who we all are – is a profound holiness, a spark, a flame, and a goodness that connects us and is shared with all of life.

Touching the edge - letting go of our limitations

I'm running, and my breath is rapid and shallow. My heart is racing. My running buddy has pulled ahead of me yet again, and the chatter in my head starts up once more, full speed ahead: “You're no good at this, why are you even bothering to try? You're a failure at running, you haven't trained enough, race day is coming up and you're going to be awful at it, you're going to hurt yourself.” The physical sensations of running when I hit this point are frighteningly similar to panic attacks. I blink to hold back tears and keep running. Foot, foot, foot. The sensations, the thoughts, and the experiences eventually pass. I return to gratitude at the end of the run.

Running has been both a liberating and a painful experience for me. It takes me to places of shame and it gives me a sense of joy and an adrenaline-rush like no other. I delve right into the feelings of body shame – that I'm not good enough, that my body is failing me – and right into the feelings of exhilaration – the power of the determined mind, the feeling of “I can do this,” the chance to let my brain unwind, and the joy of accomplishment.

The flip side of the coin with coming to peace with our bodies is letting go of the limiting stories we have with regards to them. Olympic-level athletes often speak of how the biggest competitor they face is not the person they are racing against, but their own minds. One possible trajectory for the spiritual journey with the body is to listen to and accept the stories created by our minds around what we believe is possible, and then to safely unlearn these stories and get more in touch with the direct experience of what is happening as we move, stretch, and strengthen.

When we encounter something unpleasant in the process of moving our bodies, our instant reaction is often to shrink away from it. Sometimes if we're able to push at the edge, however, we realize that “unpleasant” is nothing more than a category our mind creates for uncomfortable sensations. I'm certainly not advocating for pushing oneself to a place where there is pain or damage to the body, but it is possible to investigate at the edges how our mind creates limiting stories surrounding uncomfortable experiences. As we say in yin yoga, take it to your edge and then sit with the experience of the sensation. You may be surprised to learn that you're not as small as you thought you were.

Living In the Moment: The Body

A large part of the spiritual journey is the integration of the whole person – that is, when we stop compartmentalizing our selves into separate categories of “body,” “mind,” “emotions,” “spirit,” and so on. In particular, the body is a site of extreme dis-integration, in a world where unhealthy concepts of the body abound. Whether it's the flesh-hating bent of some organized religion, or the flesh-selling culture of consumer capitalism – I think it's really important to unpack how we think about our bodies.

Being a gay man in Vancouver - “Hollywood North” - it's pretty easy to get caught up in the marketplace of bodies. The pressure to conform to a particular body type – to be the muscled, hairless, perfectly manicured, and tanned dude wearing all the right clothes – can be overpowering at times. Hidden just beneath a thin veneer of “living a healthy lifestyle” is a deep pressure to conform to a particular way of looking. As our society has become more embedded with “marketplace consciousness,” we commodify and sell our bodies. We spend enormous amounts of money modifying and rebuilding them, trying to fit an aesthetic that is virtually unattainable.

Body shaming is so widespread in our culture. In the past, gender theory and feminism focussed on how women are required to manipulate their bodies – often in extreme and unhealthy ways – in order to fit into a specific body type. Of course, that same pressure exists for men – and speaking from the experience of being queer – it can be particularly intense for gay men. Value and worth is assigned based on body shape rather than looking to the beauty which exists at the core of each person. The fact that humanity is blessed with an enormous variety of body shapes and sizes, and that “healthy” doesn't look the same for every person barely registers. There's always something “wrong” with our bodies that we need to “fix.”

Of course, this body shaming has enormous implications when it comes to our mental and spiritual wellbeing. Rather than living in a healthy, integrated way – where the focus is on creating balance within our bodies, our minds, our whole person – we create artificial goals of how we think we should look and pursue it with a self-judging aggression. In addition, we spread hate by mocking or judging those who don't look like we think they should. And in the perpetual journey to lose weight, we forget that the scale and waist-size is just a metric, just a number.

How much better off would we be if we could come to live at peace with our bodies, just as they are, right here and now? We spend so much time being unhappy with ourselves – when we really could spend time practicing a healthy attitude free of shaming where we're actually happy with the way we are. When I'm old, I hope to have spent more time being happy with myself than standing in front of a mirror worrying that I don't have bulging biceps.

In a recent yoga class, one of my teachers said, “live in your body right now. Not the body you had last week. Not the body you had ten years ago. Not the body you want to have. The body as it is, right here and now, as you're sitting and breathing on the mat.” We need to stop inhabiting the body in our minds and learn to live in the body that actually exists – with all its scars, belly fat, the hair that grows in strange places, the loss of flexibility as a result of growing old, the cellulite on our butts, and all of our beautiful imperfections. This doesn't mean we will end up stopping exercising or eating healthy – those things are part of the spiritual journey too. As we let go of the limiting stories which prevent us from fully expressing our bodies, with dedication and practice we may also discover the ability to do things which we never thought possible.

I recently injured my right upper hamstring attachment. As I worked through the injury, I realized that my mind would immediately jump to “fixing the problem” as I practiced forward folds. It takes an intentional mental shift to stop thinking about the soreness and aching as a problem, and see it rather just as it is – a sensation of soreness which the mind judges as unpleasant and tries to push away. We need to stop the war against our bodies, and learn to celebrate ourselves just as we are, even as we stretch and build balance into our physical selves.

Starting fresh all over again

Lately, I've been pondering how much of my life has been spent where I feel as though I'm not really present as it's happening. Perhaps it's my tendency to focus on the negative - and I know I can ruminate on "time wasted," and so need to be mindful when examining this aspect of my life - but I also know a lot of life has passed me by when I've felt really disengaged and disempowered. Time and energy spent in cycles of anxiety and depression, hours spent pursuing distractions from my anxiety but also keeping me from truly living out my passions, too much time spent unhappy with my place in life, and a feeling like I'm lacking real dedication to any particular goal. These feelings crystallized and changed this weekend when I travelled with my partner to his ten-year reunion for musical theatre school - in particular, when I heard about the year he spent intensively developing his skills as a performer: six days a week dedicated to pursuing his dreams, and putting his whole life into his passions. I realized that I've never really had that level of dedication or self-discipline in my life. I want to - no, I need to develop a plan to re-engage with my passions in life.  I've never really felt like I've given anything my all - so often, I feel like I'm just "floating." The moments of my life when I've felt most fully alive have been when I've really been pursuing my calling – that is, really engaged in work towards something bigger than myself.

After some soul searching, on July 9 of this year, I decided that this year would be a “year of personal growth” and marked the day on my calendar. I've scrambled a little bit to figure out what exactly that means, but I think it will involve intentionally engaging myself in my life's work, and really following what Baron Baptiste calls my “true north” - which for me is a spiritual focus on embodying lovingkindness. To that end, I want to pursue it to my fullest ability. I want this next year to be a “life boot camp” as it were. I'm going to start fresh all over again. Work on mental health so that I can truly love myself with all of my flaws. Work on being gentle and disciplined with myself in such a way that I can really blossom and flourish. Work with my body, and really practice my yoga and physical wellbeing so that I can live in a balanced, integrated way.

I want to learn to put my whole heart into living. I want to learn to take care of myself – body, soul, and mind – to be able to fully live in the present moment in a healthy, loving way. I want to celebrate myself. I want to end the cyclical judging voice that plays so continuously in my head.

To this end, this is my prayer this evening:

May I embody lovingkindness.

May I love myself.

May the benefit of this be for everyone, everywhere.

May it be so.

“The only obstacle you face is yourself.”

“No,” screams my inner monologue, “The only obstacle I am facing right now is you.”

The you I'm referring to is a yoga teacher, spewing spiritual jargon all over the studio, and I'm getting very annoyed. Maybe on some level he's right – the obstacle is my very personal reaction to his teaching style. I take a moment to remind myself that this is an opportunity for patience. And it's not what he's saying that is irritating me – after all, even though I find his style aggressive, he's right. You don't need all the shit that you think you do – you'll never be truly, deeply happy even when you get the promotion, the car, the hot girlfriend. The ego, the “little self,” needs to die so that our true nature can be realized. The “true self,” the spirit, the inner flame, the little piece of God within us, whatever you want to call it. But it's the fact that this guy's ego is large enough to fill the entire room that is really rubbing me the wrong way. On reflection later, I think he's replaced one sense of ego with an entirely new one – the spiritual ego. The “I'm better than you because I'm a better yogi” ego. I don't need as much stuff as you. I live more in the present than you.

Really, what it is, is hubris.

I think the difference between pride and hubris is one that we need to tease out in our society. Pride can be a synonym with hubris, for sure, but I'll call them two separate terms for the sake of this discussion. Here I'll define pride as justified self-respect. It's the sort of thing which develops in our life from fundamentally being okay with ourselves, feeling compassion for our failings, loving our strengths, and building on our competencies. It's knowing our inner strength. It's taking joy in our capacity to overcome obstacles. Honestly, I think this sort of pride is tied to a sense of humility in knowing our limitations. It blossoms from a place of deep self-love and letting go of the repetitive, self-abusive stories of failure that choke us. It's the sort of thing which inadvertently gets beaten down when we focus too heavily on our identity as a “sinner.”

And then there's hubris. It's this inflated sense of ego that happens, I think, in response to actually not feeling okay about ourselves, about our failings and shortcomings. It's overcompensation. We build a hard shell of “I'm better than...” around ourselves to protect ourselves from the harsh reality that we kind of suck sometimes, and we do stupid shit and we make pretty awful mistakes. In response, we tell ourselves a narcissistic story that denies the reality of our errors.

One of the real problems with hubris (besides the fact that it can really piss people off) is that it prevents us from seeing the rich treasure that our mistakes offer us. We don't deal with the fact that we really mess up – and that's okay. Rather than accepting our mistakes and transforming them into learning opportunities, we deny them. It's a place where very little spiritual growth actually happens.

This is the space of leaving

Dear Saskatoon,

This is the space I fashion:

the cup of my hands

for holding the salt water of crying.

This is the space of a long held sigh –

finally escapes,

a rare beauty,

a prayer for what will never come to pass.

This is the space between, within our chests

as we embrace

and ready to part;

lips sharing between us

the hidden lamentations of which we dare not, shall not whisper.

This is the space between our palms

enclosing the knowledge of fingers intertwined no more;

questions which cannot be answered:

shall I ever again feel the warmth of your soul

on my soul?

shall these scars ever fade?

This is the space between our breaths –

fear, the fear I abandon, a shield clattering to the floor

so I can take up new moments of terror,

as I summon the one, the one with a sword

who shall enter, enter, and aid

in the space of saying

farewell.

This is the space within the pulsing of blood,

between one drumbeat and the next –

a psalm of thanksgiving,

inner flowering

for the ones who came with me on pilgrimage.

This is the space opening between stars

stretching to hold memories:

sweet nectar, broken vows,

feet pounding the floor, summoning the gods of music with our sweat,

cries of new babes in the vastness of night;

the space which holds the promise of sunrises yet to be born,

and footsteps on roads which have not even been laid.

This is the space between alleys and broken fences;

abandoned places where I weep for

this rough, unpolished jewel we call a city – my lover –

filled with whores and new hopes,

this fortress of familiar,

the corners and streets and great cement towers,

the grates and bridges, glaring neon, creaking steel,

jazz and pot smoke and rotting waste –

a map locked within,

comfort and loss.

This is the space of a canyon,

where the echoing sounds of gratitude linger:

quiet murmurings, litanies of thanks for the places you cut me.

This is the space of leaving.