Finally, the fog has come back in. As I sit in my morning meditation the call and response of the near and distant foghorns are like cosmic singing bowls. For a while I indulge in a little movie that pops into my meditative state, of enormous foggy elephants in tutus dancing in the middle of the Bay, Alcatraz as their footstone and the Golden Gate a sweet hurdle. My imagination was honed by Disney, apparently, and I guess this will always be with me.
My first blog post in a month. Why haven’t I been writing? I mean to, and every day I think of it, every night I make a plan that the next day I will carve out some time, but I guess what happens is everything else. I’m so admiring of the folks who can be steady in their work, even and consistent. Even and consistent has never been my strength. I seem to work in bursts. I go to where the fire is, and I guess I’ve had a lot of other fires taking priority. I’m happy to come back to this blog, that I love to tend.
One of my recent preoccupations is the study I’ve undertaken in order to get certification in Depth Hypnosis and Applied Shamanism. This work came into my life in a rush, and all at once I was driven to know everything there is to know. As I work with people I see the great benefits of this work, how quickly it is possible for us to let go of old patterns that have been agonizing. My favorite part of this work is that it requires me to be the guide rather than the knower. As much as I work to know, I also must learn to get out of the way of knowing. So as I learn, I continue to shift my own patterns. The change has been remarkable.
I’ve always been confused by the word “healing.” The word implies a kind of brokenness that I’ve had a hard time owning. Healing is for major trauma and illness, and for someone like me who has had a pretty easy time of it, I was uncomfortable thinking that this kind of work could apply to me. I was raised in the “I’m fine, dammit,” school of life, by which you handle the recurring patterns of suffering in life with fortitude, stamina, and I left the Healing Arts to those with real problems.
When I embraced this work, at first the changes I noticed in my life were subtle, but the process was so interesting I kept working. The meditations, the visualizations, the journeys, brought me to places in this life, and in past lives, in which I found power. In fact, I began to connect the dots of how crucial power is to wholeness, and when I started to see that, that’s when I realized that things had really started to transform in my life.
For instance. Lately, after reconnecting with my dear drum teacher Fred Klatz, I’ve been working on getting back to some rudiments. Sometimes we need to go back to re-hone the skills we’ve been coasting on. Part of my desire to do this is that in the new videos the band has been creating recently, I’ve been very aware of where I’ve been lagging. Also, there are some new songs I’m learning that I just can’t play due to my limitations. I don’t want to have all these limitations, so I’ve resolved to get rid of some.
When I started playing Led Zeppelin’s music, a friend told me, “you will do well with this music, and you can totally get it all down… except for this one song. I’ve been trying to play that song for thirty years, and it has made me crazy. Just give up, and save yourself the misery.”
I’ve let that limitation be my reality for fifteen years, and because of the other work I just mentioned, I recently decided to just let this limitation go, and start working on that song.
This is the kind of thing that happens as I do this other, spiritual work: limitations fall away. I hear the familiar voices in my mind that I’ve believed for sometimes my whole life about the choices I should make, about what is possible. Then, one day I notice that these old ways of thinking are just not there anymore. It’s not like I have a big revelation and then a series of mental resolutions in order to sustain this new way of thinking. It’s more like, one day, something reminds me of a way I used to think, and I can barely remember how it used to feel to think that way. It’s a lightening up, a shedding, and seemingly effortless.
One of these big shifts has been in the way I spend my days, and in my productiveness. I remember that I used to have a sense of dread and then procrastination about certain necessary activities: accounting, exercising, cleaning the bathrooms. I would put off these things and then have to roust some kind of fake energy in order to get one of these things started, and I would find every excuse to put it off.
Now I notice that there isn’t any dread. When I wake, I move to what seems most necessary on my list for the day, and work from there, with the same kind of even energy for everything. This is a subtle but profound change in my days. There isn’t this need to gather energy and then push through in order to exercise, say. I don’t go through the mind battle of knowing I “should” do it and then berating myself into it. These days, I’m just enjoying connecting, for some small part of the day, with my physicality, in whatever way that looks. Exercise is just part of my day now. I still hear the excuses, but they drift away and I don’t attach anything to them. This is very new.
I also see this in the people I work with. I see that sometimes they don’t even realize that the patterns of misery they are caught have gradually let go in subtle ways, and when I ask after a few sessions about these old ways of being, it’s almost as if they’re surprised I’m asking. Someone who has not been able to sleep for years, for example, when I ask how they slept recently says, “pretty good,” not with any kind of amazement, but more like a matter of course. Whey wouldn’t they sleep well? It’s as if they don’t quite remember the angst of insomnia. Remarkable.
I’m on an immediate reread of “When Fear Falls Away” by Jan Frazier. This book has been a revelation. It is the account of a woman who, in 2003, asked… someone, she didn’t know to whom she was speaking or praying, to be released from fear of a coming medical procedure. She experienced an immediate release: no more fear. The book is the story of this awakening, her liberation, the enlightenment that spiritual seekers seek: loss of the ego self, the final push into the release of conditioning. However you see it or call it, the idea of letting go of fear, which may be at the base of all of our recurring patterns of suffering, seems to be the beginning of freedom.
My mentor has had this experience, and the words in the book are familiar to the lessons I’ve been learning from her for years. The book tells the same story, in slightly different language. What I love about it is the illustration of how the author continues to live in the modern world as her awakening happens. Job, husband, children, writing. What happens when you lose the attachment to your ego self, the one with your name, the one you identify with? What happens to your relationships, your motivations, your passions?
As I read, I recognize my misunderstanding about awakening and the limitations that have kept me from it. The big question was always, how do I care about what I love when the ego is gone? If I awaken, does this mean I leave my life, to shuffle off, like Ramana Maharshi or some other master, to a cave where I stop being aware of my body for weeks on end? Or do I start a peripatetic life into monasteries or different spiritual communities and give up my life as drummer and writer and wife and lover of pug? What I write about is my life. What happens to writing? When I play drums I connect my heart with the listeners’ hearts through music. What of this pursuit and passion? What of the future? Of dreams and plans? Of hope?
I am reminded of my friend Jeannine’s story of the letter she wrote to the monk after a long meditation retreat. She asked just this question: what happens to my marriage and my love of my dogs and my career should I awaken? Won’t enlightenment disrupt those things in which I find meaning?
The monk wrote back a short answer: Awakening helps everyone. There is no downside to awakening.
We had a good laugh about that. We needed a monk to tell us that? It was our small, ego self, so afraid of losing this reactive hold it has on us, telling us that it could be a bad thing.
Fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of humiliation, fear of heartbreak, fear of death, just scratch the surface of what you think can not happen in your life, what bothers you, what keeps you sleepless, despairing, unavailing, and you will find fear of some kind there. It is fear which creates all of the limitations we place on this glorious life. Fear which keeps our world in division and darkness.
In Frazier’s book, when fear releases, everything improves. When you are not in fear of losing what you love, you love more deeply and exquisitely. I want that for my relationships and for my work. In fact, my whole music career has been to find ways to emit love as I play, to find ways to move energy and to communicate through music. Can I use the lessons I have learned there to open more fully into every moment?
What if there was no fear as I played, no fear as I practiced and worked out these parts that I have written off as impossible? What if the tedium of repetitive practice is focused, with complete attention on the task at hand, rather than allowing the fear of failure to let in the small buzz of distractibility of all these other things that I could be doing instead. What if there was in my mind only sole purpose? Focused attention, joy in doing, and then after a time, a letting go?
I see this is the power of art, the power of creation. Artists lie arm in arm with our fears, and when we let go, the light of inspiration flows in.
I have found some of this state in writing. I remember lying on my bed as a teen, writing, before I knew of meditation or shamanism or any of it. I would close my eyes and find a place of openness into which words could stream. It was a way of automatic writing that I lost for many years and when it returned, I see now that it was letting go of the fear of judgment. I found honesty, and therefore freedom. It still feels like Clem, her turns of phrase, her choice of meter, the voice, but now a Clem guided by truth aligned with awareness, vulnerable, without the fear that once muddled the voice.
This is what I long for in all things. I mean this not in a striving way, not in the outward push, the gritty, competitive, adrenaline-fueled yearning and grasping. It is that my whole being longs to be fully in this world. It is an asking, an opening, a receptivity.
I finally understand more of my mentor’s teachings for all these years. Life is play. We play at these expressions of self and joy is the energy that drives it forward with freedom. Until now, maybe it’s all been an intellectual understanding of something that I couldn’t possibly imagine. But something has cracked open with all this work. Some kind of healing has indeed taken place, and showed me that my first instinct was correct. There is nothing to be healed. Our work is only to re-discover our innate wholeness.
In my meditation practice, which is the one part of my life that has been wonderfully steady lately, I’ve begun to ask. Let me be free of fear, so I may love exquisitely all the richness of this life. May I may open to that state which is already here, and which shows itself in so many gorgeous ways already And to my bass drum foot, oh how much we have to learn in love.
***
You can hear me read this on Soundcloud or as an iTunes Podcast.
Please visit Patreon.com/Clemthegreat to support this writing and for lots of other goodies. Thank you in advance!