But the funny thing (not funny haha, more like funny-oh-gee-look-at-all-this-rage-inside-me-funny) is that whether it’s a good day or a bad day, it’s neither. Because inevitably, if I’m feeling good I’ll at some point in the day suddenly start to feel not good. Or if I’m feeling not good, I’ll at some point suddenly start to feel good. Except that sometimes, if I’m feeling not good, I’ll keep feeling not good all day long, and there won’t be a “suddenly” that day. Funny.

All of which is to say, I don’t remember enrolling but apparently I have signed up for a master class in impermanence. The class’s nickname being MS, of course.

So what does one do when they cannot even count on the most basic thing – their body? Forget expecting people to actually stay alive just because they’ve been alive for my entire life. I’ve lowered my expectations now. I just want to be able to rely on my body to function properly. Is that so much to ask? I mean, really? But alas, it seems my body is simply not a trustworthy pal these days. And banging my head against this wall of truth has only given me many, many headaches, and some serious bruising.

Two Choices

So I’ve finally arrived at a place of acceptance. I have accepted that for whatever reason, the lesson the universe thinks I need to learn now is about the essential unflinching can’t-pretend-it’s-otherwise nature of this reality, which is that change is indeed the only constant. And the illusion of stability is just that, an illusion. Up until this year, I’ve been able to live within that illusion and get by okay. But things have gotten heavy. And in the face of the less than pleasant fact that there is nothing I can rely on to remain stable, alive, and working properly, even myself, I am left with only two choices.

One: I can go insane. Fall down a black hole of existential despair about the nature of the universe. Or two: I can become present, now, here in this, which is the only place where life is actually taking place anyway.

So I’ve chosen the second option (though I’ve certainly had my fair share of glimmers of the first in the last several months). And I’m beginning to get it. There actually is something that we can rely on in this world, and it’s this moment. You know how I know that? Because this moment is happening, right now. So we can rely on it. Because it’s now. And now. And now. And the shit in the past and the fear of the future are all movie projections born in the land of make-believe (my mind). But now is here. And now. So I’m putting my attention on this, on cultivating my ability to be present. In this moment. Here. Now.

The best way I’ve found to do this is Michael Brown’s book The Presence Process: A Journey into Present Moment Awareness. I’ve talked about it a lot on this blog before – mostly last summer when I read it the first time. But I suppose I had to suffer a lot more before I could conjure the necessary level of commitment and will and discipline to really go through the entire 10-week program and take it seriously. If you haven’t already, please go get this book and read it and do the program and tell me what your experience is with it. It’s a game-changer, and I’m pretty sure we could all use one.

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Me walking barefoot to the river

I am walking to the river.

I am walking to the river because my heart is broken and it keeps demanding that I be out in nature. I suppose because it’s closer to God out there, and nothing short of being embraced by the entire Universe could ease this.

So I am walking to the river, barefoot because it feels better to have all that extra sensation and information coming from the bottom of my feet. The way to the river from my house is past one of the very wealthy sections of my town, where the mansions pepper the edge of the water and the properties have seven-foot-tall brick walls lining the sidewalk, so us common folk can’t see in.

When I was a little girl we used to spend summers in Israel and me and my sister and my cousins used to take long walks barefoot there too, and I remember these pale pink concrete walls lining the sidewalks in front of some of those houses, though I think those were built not for privacy but to protect against gunshots from Arabs. Of course I wasn’t aware of that then. I couldn’t have been more than six, and what I remember is how light and free I felt, how I would graze my fingertips across the surface of the concrete as I walked, feeling the bumps beneath my fingers and the hot pavement beneath my feet, inhaling the fullness of unhindered possibility and joyful presence with every breath.

I’m walking to the river, trying to take a full breath now but it’s not happening. Outside my awareness my arm reaches out and skims the brick wall, searching for something it can’t find.

Let it Be

My view of the river

A few minutes later I’m sitting by the river, on the concrete wall high above the water with my shoes beside me and my feet dangling in the air. I’m listening to this gorgeous, epic, gospel cover of The Beatles’ “Let it Be” by Carol Woods & Timothy T. Mitchum and that’s when I realize it.

For the past four years I’ve been living in resistance and fear that the man I loved would leave me for this other woman – a woman who’s been in his life for a very long time and with whom he still has some unfinished business (to put it as euphemistically as possible). For four years, I’ve been so absolutely terrified of this potential outcome that I’ve never allowed myself – not once – to imagine it all the way through. To picture him leaving me for her and to feel how that would feel. But as I am sitting here watching the water and letting the power of the phrase “Let it be” sing its way into me, I find myself opening to brave the unspeakable.

I dive into what will surely be my death, the worst possible scenario. I play it out. I imagine them together, cuddling at night, watching a movie before bed. I see them eating breakfast together. I see the love in his eyes as he looks at her. I see them walking down Main Street together, holding hands. All of it, I see all of it.

And I die.

I fucking die.

But then the realization comes. I’m finally on the other side of it and I finally get it. I get that the resistance and the fear is so much worse than if it actually came true. I get that the resistance and the fear is where the dis-ease is. And now, considering that for the first time in years I could be free of this resistance, the full-blown experience of FREE washes over me. I recall the sensation of my arm reaching out to touch the brick wall as I walked here. I get that for four years, my resistance to and fear of this dreadful possibility has been perpetuating Multiple Sclerosis in my body. I have been making myself sick.

In-flame-ation

Here, let me show you what I mean. Put your palms together. Now rub them together while pressing them into each other. Do you feel the heat that you’re creating? That’s what happens when we’re in a state of resistance. The resistance causes friction and the friction causes heat to build up. When there’s too much heat in the body, it goes up in flames. It becomes inflamed.

MS – if we’re to believe the prevailing theory – is an in-flamm-atory demyelinating condition. It is the literal, symptomatic manifestation of too much heat in the body. I’m hot as hell (and I don’t mean that in the much more pleasant interpretation of the phrase).

And the truth is, the last four years have just been a particularly acute version of what all of us experience on the daily. We’re all living in resistance because we’re unconditional beings living in a conditional world (as Michael Brown puts it in his book Alchemy of the Heart), and as a result, we’ve all had our hearts broken as children. We’re all in perpetual resistance to our authentic nature because we learned very early on that we needed to shut up and sit straight and behave ourselves for God’s sake if we were to be accepted and loved. So we do. Or we do the opposite and play the role of the rebel. But whichever role we choose, we’re in resistance to the free, uninhibited, authentic, magical beings we were when we arrived in this world, and as a result our bodies are boiling, which is why phrases like “lose my cool” and “blow my top” are so pervasive.

So I’m sitting by the river. And it’s a perfect day – 85 degrees and very little humidity. My skin is cool but there’s a fire raging inside me, and it has been for the last four years, and surely the charring started long before that.

But I don’t want to be in flames any more.

So I’m moving on.

I feel like I’m dying, but there is no rebirth without a death before it. And I understand now that my resistance and my MS are one and the same, so I have no choice but to just…let it be.

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The red pillow on my carpet where it all went down.

Monday around 9:30 p.m., if you had walked into my house you would have found me sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth, sobbing, heaving, and thrusting out deep, guttural, staccato sounds of agony.

This is not what I typically do on a Monday evening.

But something serendipitous is happening. Not fun, no not fun at all. Not even a little bit. But definitely serendipitous. I have found myself in a moment of my life where I’m faced with an extremely challenging and painful emotional situation. And (finally) the universe has simultaneously presented me with the tools to address it. In fact, not just to address it but to use it and evolve through it. (“The only way out is through.”) The tools have appeared as the work of Michael Brown and his two books The Presence Process, which I spoke of a few days ago, and Alchemy of the Heart (Amazon Affiliate link), as well as his audios from his various seminars via Live365 radio on The Presence Process station, which you can access through his website The Presence Portal.

The essence of Brown’s work is this: Every time you get upset (set up) by a situation in your life, it is simply a trigger, a reflection of unintegrated emotional charges from your childhood. Every time. Without exception.

We spend our entire lives running from our deep pain and hurt. We drink, we eat, we fuck, we pray, we do this, we do that, anything to avoid really, really feeling anything. When an upsetting situation arises in our life, we attempt to fix it by changing our physical circumstance. We switch lovers, we move to a different town, we get a different job. Or we simply believe that the situation that’s upsetting us is the fault of whomever is involved, and we ask ourselves questions like “Why does this always happen to me?” But because we’re not addressing the causal point of our experience – the emotional signature from our childhood that hasn’t been processed and integrated – we just recreate the same circumstances in a “new” place.

Being With the Emotion

So Brown advises the following I’d-rather-stick-needles-under-my-fingernails exercise instead: He says to sit down and simply “be with” the emotion without condition. Do not tell yourself the story about what’s happening and why and who’s to blame. Do not try to suppress or criticize what you are feeling. Just sit your ass down and be with it. Feel the feeling. And in doing so, just as we don’t need to tell our body how to breathe, we don’t need to tell ourselves how to integrate these emotions. By allowing ourselves to have the experience, we’re finally allowing the innate wisdom of our body to do the work. We don’t have to know how. We just need to trust and know that it will integrate. And once it does, we have cleaned up the causal point of this anger, fear, and grief. (At least one of them anyway.)

Which brings us back to my grief-stricken spasms Monday night, sitting on my living room floor. Because what happened was this: Without the story to accompany this feeling, something opened up. As I sat there emoting all over myself, I felt very surely and deeply that what I was crying about did not in fact have a damn thing to do with what I thought I was crying about. I was grieving from a place much older and more expertly hidden. And when it was done, I felt a calm take over. I didn’t feel “good”, but I did feel…at rest.

Dis-ease

But what was really interesting for me was that as I sat there, still and centered in the aftermath, I understood from a place that didn’t involve thought that what I had just released healed a part of what Multiple Sclerosis is in my body. Because I know, as surely as I’ve ever known anything, that my illness was born of that pent up dis-ease. I know that I have just begun – I mean truly begun – the gritty, dirty, ugly, uncomfortable work of becoming exquisitely healthy (and it doesn’t have anything to do with prescription medication). And what I love about this particular model is that Michael Brown is not a guru and he doesn’t claim to have the answers. He has simply communicated a path that works. But the work, and the answers, that’s all us.

When I asked Bruce Lipton how to change my beliefs, this is the answer I was looking for. It’s not as pretty and clean as I would have liked, but it’s powerful, and I know as I’ve ever known anything that I’m on my way, and MS is on it’s way…out.

And as for the extremely challenging emotional situation I’m dealing with right now, I’m going to trust in one of Brown’s favorite statements, which is that we don’t get what we want or need, but we do get what we require. We always get what we require.

Want more inspiration? Read Broke Down or go to the main page to Get Inspired.

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“As I experimented on myself with various physical, mental, and emotional techniques, I discovered that when I maintained what I then called ‘a high personal energy frequency,’ I lessened the intensity of my pain and the rate of its reoccurrence substantially. This was the first whisper of what I now call present moment awareness.”

Michael first encountered the “radiance of present moment awareness” in a Native American sweat lodge in Tucson, Arizona and then again a few months later, after ingesting a tea brewed from peyote cactus. “Although it was only fleeting, I experienced the undeniable sense of wholeness that comes from connecting intimately with Presence. I felt physically present, mentally clear, emotionally balanced, and vibrationally ‘in tune.’”

As with my initial sweat lodge experience, being able to feel and consciously commune with Presence throughout this peyote experience reunited me with the precious part of my authentic nature that had been obscured by the noise, busyness, and distractions of daily life. The peyote enabled me to step through a perceptual veil, on the other side of which life revealed itself as connected by a single intimate, intelligent, shared Presence. I saw how the breathtaking, luminous beauty of the natural world is hidden from us because of our preoccupation with unintegrated past trauma and fearful future projections.

In that moment, I became aware that my painful condition was no mere chance, but was purposeful. My painful neurological condition revealed itself not as my enemy, but as my friend and facilitator. It was Presence calling me back from a state in which I had unconsciously attached my attention to the mental web of time, causing my attention to become scattered.

During this encounter with “the medicine” [peyote] it became obvious that the most important quest I could undertake would be to discover a practical way to increase my experience of present moment awareness. Unless I discovered a means of accomplishing this for myself, my usefulness to others would remain limited because I was inauthentic.

It was also apparent that experiences such as sweat lodges and peyote aren’t for everyone. The mechanisms of a journey into present moment awareness have to be as natural as possible – a pathway anyone can follow, no matter what their circumstances. Hence one of the questions I asked Presence was: How can present moment awareness be achieved primarily through inner work, instead of having to rely on external conditions, substances, tools, ceremonies, rites, and rituals?

The Answer

The answer to that questions ultimately became The Presence Process: A Journey into Present Moment Awareness, the book that found its way to me via a new friend who suggested it during my recent magical weekend. Two months ago, after my interview with Bruce Lipton, I asked the universe (also known as Presence, the Divine Matrix, God, what have you) what the next thing was that I needed to know to guide myself and my clients to wellness. This book, I now know, is the universe’s answer.

Bil Gorakh Hayashi, Professor of Humanities and Psychology at Columbia University, Chicago, wrote the Foreword for the book and explained the essence of the process well:

Michael often tells us “Don’t kill the messenger. Receive the message.” The “messengers” are the people and situations that “upset” us, seem to thwart and diminish us. The “messages” are the unintegrated, not-yet-resolved emotional memories and wounds from early childhood that are being played out through these current “adult” experiences. Like neglected children, they won’t leave us alone but continue to “out-picture” in our daily life as the individuals, events, and circumstances that cause us pain and discomfort. Often they express through one of three core emotions: anger, fear, or grief. Our usual, habitual response is either mental or physical. We try to figure out with the mind or distract ourselves through physical activity and avoidance. We may eat, run, overachieve, or simply get into our head to avoid engaging. Yet, the scared, wounded kid place in us continues to suffer, desperately wanting and needing attention and acceptance. To approach these wounds, often our oldest and most tender, requires a method that’s both safe and effective. Fortunately, The Presence Process provides us with both.

Here’s a link to purchase the book, which I strongly encourage (this is an Amazon Affiliate link):

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