healing – Letters to Leland

Celebrating a joyful weekend, and other updates

February 12, 2024

Dear Leland and Everett,

We had a pretty wonderful weekend. On Saturday we celebrated the lunar new year, in part by partaking in the wonderful traditions of rec league basketball and attending a friend’s birthday party. Jokes aside, I really enjoyed watching your games and spending time with you before, during, and after your games. And fortunately, rec league games go quickly enough that we still had plenty of time remaining on Sunday to enjoy a festive lunch and dinner together. On Sunday we ran errands together before the Super Bowl; our original plan was to watch with friends, but our host contracted Covid, so we watched at home as a family. Overall, while we didn’t do anything particularly noteworthy, I just enjoyed being with you guys and your mom. It was a peaceful, joyful weekend.

Perhaps related: on Friday I decided to follow up on my Thursday meditation. In particular, I wanted to explore the anxiety I sensed I was radiating and the thin but incomplete layer of darkness I sensed covering my light. After settling into my meditation I identified the anxious energy rather effortlessly. After just a moment sitting with the energy I remembered that our anxious energy is really just how we experience resistance to positive emotion. Said differently, I’m starting to believe that anytime I feel a surge of energy, there is an underlying positive emotion (ultimately love, but often paired with some inspiration, experienced as a desire to do or say something). I reminded myself not to resist, and just allow the energy to be.

Around this point my attention shifted to my receptor. I haven’t meditated regarding my receptor in quite awhile, and I didn’t intentionally shift my attention there. But soon after I elected to allow my energy to flow without resistance, my attention shifted to the receptor and I felt a release of loving energy emanating outward. I felt a strange combination of peace and calm combined with energy flow. The energy reminded me of how I might feel when inspired to create something, or motivated to do something. In other words, not sensations I normally feel paired with peace and calm. I just sat with the variety of sensations as if practicing holding them simultaneously. This felt healing.

In fact, at this point I imagined my head lying in Jesus’ lap, as if Jesus were nursing me back to health. I looked at Jesus as if to say “okay, I’m ready to get up”, sensing this new energy would be sufficiently healing to provide inspiration and motivation while simultaneously healing whatever I have left to heal. Jesus didn’t speak, but looked at me as if to say “No child; continue to rest and heal. Go slow. Take it easy.”

With some reflection, I take two meanings from that experience. First, I am reminded to focus on being rather than doing. American society is very focused on what we do, and in particular what we accomplish. And so we feel constantly compelled to do, in an effort to accomplish the things that will bring us love, abundance, and joy. God reminds us that we are in fact called to just Be, and in the process of being experience God’s love, abundance, and joy.

Counterintuitively, Being does not mean existing in a state of sloth or even inactivity. Being means allowing love, inspiration, and energy to flow through us unimpeded. My suspicion is that those who experience Being are in fact quite active and productive, but perhaps not in ways that we commonly associate with achievement and status.

My second takeaway from the meditation reinforces a recently coalescing thought: the real purpose of life is to heal ourselves and to experience wholeness. Important to highlight here: healing ourselves is the path to healing others. At a very deep level, what we want is what God wants, and what is best for the world. Doing good becomes a natural extension of our Being, as we act from a place of healing and wholeness, and through our very presence we become an invitation to others to heal.

I actually think this is what Jesus meant when he said “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Jesus was speaking as the I AM, the state of total harmony with God. Jesus is intimating that we each possess the tools to achieve this state, and that the path to the Kingdom is through ourselves, via the path of healing, to discover the I AM: connection to God and all there is.

I also think this is what Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas means when he says “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” We heal by surrendering what is within us (e.g. the sources of resistance). Resisting the invitation to let go of our pain brings us into encounter with increasing levels of suffering.

And how does one heal? Well, we’ve talked about this once before, but I increasingly believe that the path to healing is through surrender. If I identify another relevant tool I will share, but so far my experience suggests that identifying resistance and then surrendering the resistance (with God’s help if needed) can solve pretty much all problems. Our suffering comes not from what is, but from our resistance and unwillingness to accept what is. When we can let go of the resistance, we can find peace. We still experience waves of energy and emotion, but let go of our attachments.

I’d be remise if I didn’t highlight a couple recent observations. I’m spending less time on my phone; I still use my phone a lot, but I no longer feel a compulsive need to look at my phone the minute I feel under-stimulated. I still find switching away from my phone and back into the real world to be somewhat challenging. Perhaps I’ll get better at switching, or perhaps I’ll continue to decrease my usage of my phone. I’m drinking less caffeine than I used to: for years my routine has been to drink 2 cups of coffee each day. In the last week I’ve skipped coffee at least 3 or 4 days. I didn’t skip the coffee out of any purposeful effort, but just a lack of interest. I felt awake and didn’t feel like I needed coffee to enhance my wakeful state. Finally, my relationship to food and alcohol are evolving. I historically binge ate and drank on weekends, I think in an effort to numb myself a bit from the stresses of the week (and metaphorically stuff those negative emotions back down). I still drink alcohol on occasion, but generally not beyond a drink or two. And even then, I’m aware that I am drinking in part because there is some emotion I don’t want to feel (and so I make the note to explore in my subsequent meditation). I still overeat, but rarely do I truly binge eat. Currently my overeating typically consists of eating a little too much at dinner time (by which point I’m not typically hungry, but want to eat dinner as a communal activity with the family). None of these changes have been intentional or purposeful, so I won’t set any goals or intention around them. Instead I observe the changes with appreciation and curiosity, and will continue to watch how I evolve.

I love you guys. Thanks for a great weekend.

Love,

Dad

Experiencing a second wave of grief

February 5, 2024

Dear Leland and Everett,

They say grief comes in waves. I’ve heard that over and over. It’s one thing to understand something intellectually; experiencing the thing is something else completely.

Last week my grief dissipated faster than I anticipated or wanted. I felt beauty in the sadness, and wanted to hold onto that feeling of beauty. The sadness hit me hard last Tuesday; by Wednesday it had lost about half its resonance, and I appreciated the feeling of lightness and joy I felt in replacement as the week progressed, but longed for the sadness to return.

I needn’t have worried. The sadness returned over the weekend, much to my surprise. Our minds think linearly; as the sadness dissipated, I assumed it was receding permanently…even as I listened to podcasts where people talked about sadness coming in waves. Despite my longing for the sadness last week, I resented its return. I resented the surprise. Of course, I cannot control the return of sadness any more than I could control its dissipation. I assume the goal is to learn how to surrender into the waves and let go of the resentment and resistance; let’s just say I’m not there yet.

We watched The Lion King over the weekend, or at least part of it. The original came out when I was in high school, and immediately became one of my favorite movies. I listened to the soundtrack over and over and over again. In my youth, the story was about a boy whose destiny was frustrated by a bad guy, but who ultimately overcame his obstacles and ‘won’. Now I see a story about a boy who expected his life to play out in a certain way (“I Just Can’t Wait to be King”) before experiencing a traumatic event (the death of his father) and developing a coping strategy (running away from home and adopting a carefree lifestyle with friends) that served a valuable purpose at the time (it may well have kept him alive) before being pulled back to face and overcome his trauma and fulfill his destiny. That story resonates deeply with me now: though my destiny was never to be King, I do feel as if I am being pulled back onto ‘my path’, at times in spite of my resistance.

As an aside: my adolescent interpretation of the meaning behind The Lion King is no more or less accurate than my middle-aged interpretation. Art (and scripture too, for that matter) not only mean different things to different people, they mean different things to the same person at different stages in life. Intriguingly, even the artist loses control of the meaning of his or her art the moment it gets released out into the world; once public, the art takes on as many meanings as there are encounters with the art. The lesson for you: you can only embrace the resonance you feel, and learn what the resonance wants to reveal; but understand that others will find different learnings in their own resonance. Hold onto your meaning and learning, but allow others the grace to learn and discover what is meant for them.

Chaos theory is a scientific concept originally exposed to me by the book Jurassic Park a couple years before The Lion King. One idea that stuck with me was nonlinear dynamics: sometimes alluded to by shorthand as the Butterfly Effect, nonlinear dynamics posit that in certain complex systems, tiny changes in inputs yield vastly different outcomes. When modeling weather patterns, for example, scientists observed that tiny variations in wind materially impacts weather patterns surprisingly quickly. The wind could change as little as the displacement caused by a butterfly flapping its wings and still yield measurable results mere weeks later (thus the name The Butterly Effect).

What I only recently learned is that chaos theory also posits that the range of possible outcomes, though large and nonlinear, tend to double back on themselves in something of a figure-8 pattern, with the 8 represented in large bands created by the range of potential outcomes. Somehow this concept helps me reconcile the age-old Christian struggle between the ideas of free will and predestination. We Americans are well versed in free will, the idea that individuals are empowered to make choices and forge their own path. Some Christians believe in predestination, the idea that an all-powerful and all-knowing God must have already determined everything, including the ‘choices’ we as individuals will make. My personal sense is that we individuals are empowered with free choice, and that our choices will set us on different possible paths, but that those paths circle around central themes that serve as apparent gravitational forces in our lives. Expressed artistically, there were many paths for Simba’s life to take, but they all centered around the gravitational pull toward his becoming king. Expressed spiritually, I think this is why Buddhists (and to a lesser extent Christians) focus on surrender, correctly recognizing that our suffering comes from struggle, and our apparent insistence in resisting the path laid out for us. Surrender into our path does not in fact mean giving up our free will. Indeed, following our path is neither easy nor comfortable. I’m beginning to think of surrender like agreeing to play a video game we design for ourselves: the game is optimized for the maximum difficulty and struggle we can handle, while ensuring we have all the tools available for us to succeed (even if that means dropping the tools into the game just in time for us to utilize).

Later in the weekend, and again last night, we listened to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”, a gloriously sad song originally released a couple years before Jurassic Park, but re-recorded last year by Luke Combs. Chapman and Combs performed the song as a duet at the Grammy’s on Sunday night, which brought the song back into my awareness. Some of the haunting sadness in Chapman’s voice is now replaced with hints of joy and cheerfulness, the observation of which brought me some gratitude.

In my youth, “Fast Car” was a song about the exhilaration of youth and escape. Listening now, I notice for the first time that the song is also about the cycles of trauma, and how as adults we relive the trauma’s of our youth unless and until we really heal. Thus, the gravitational forces of ‘destiny’ apparently expressed in chaos theory revealed themselves again through art.

We listened to the song together last night. I wept. Everett in particular found this curious, intimating he hadn’t seen me cry before (or had observed it rarely, I forget the exact framing). Leland corrected Everett: Leland is old enough to remember seeing Dad cry. I was surprised by Everett’s surprise; I feel as if I cry in front of you both regularly. Indeed in my mental model I cry all the time; perhaps I judge myself against the generations of men who came before me, who rarely if ever expressed emotion through tears. Alas, I am different; I weep somewhat regularly. Until this recent wave of grief the most reliable way for me to experience uncontrollable weeping was to watch movie scenes where dads are separated from their children (especially their sons). The idea of losing the two of you is more than I can bear. Perhaps we haven’t watched such a movie recently enough for Everett to be old enough to remember seeing his dad cry.

Interestingly, neither of you seemed particularly bothered by my uncontrolled crying. You were curious, but not resistant. You didn’t judge, you didn’t criticize, you didn’t try to distract me, even with comfort. You just let me cry. You asked why, but you didn’t resist. Everett in particular I thought might try to distract or comfort me: you often dislike when others feel negative emotions. I wonder if my own lack of resistance, coupled with your mom’s openness, enabled you to allow space for me to cry. Whatever the reason, I’m oddly grateful we all shared that experience together. I’m glad you got to see me cry, and know that I don’t mind crying. On some level or some day I hope you can appreciate processing sadness was important to me at this stage in my journey. If you remember watching the song together with your dad and can tie that experience to these stories, so much the better.

And why was I crying? I still can’t articulate it exactly. The overarching story, I think, is still me learning to surrender, and letting go of my illusion of control over my path. Somehow, though the effort to control my path yielded mostly pain and frustration, I feel an odd sadness of letting that story go. I have an odd attachment, even to the pain and frustration. I still hold some fear that I won’t have the strength or courage to walk in my path, and plenty of sadness around letting go of my cherished false idols. I think that’s enough for today, but we’ll discuss more soon.

I love you,

Dad

Love as flow

February 1, 2024

Dear Leland and Everett,

Love exists in a state of flow. Love does not sit idly waiting for someone to notice and pick it up; love moves. When mystics say things like “in order to love oneself, love others”, they refer to love in flow. If we want to feel love, we can share it and invite the flow of love through our lives; as love flows through us to others (or God), we inherently feel replenished and healed by the love we share. For some, however, before we can share or receive love we must first create space by clearing our blockages of fear and sadness. Once we create the space, love naturally flows in and invites us to share. In this natural state of flow love grows, expanding to fit the space we create and inviting us to grow the space available.

The idea that love exists in a state of flow came to me a few months ago, during my meditations. It started due to some trivial frustration with your mom (I don’t recall why I was frustrated; when you are married you will find that you carry various minor grievances regularly). On this particular occasion, as I sat down to meditate, I actually noticed the frustration, which felt as if I were carrying some negative electrical charge. Rather than do what I normally do and justify my frustration, I got curious and decided to explore. As I settled into my meditation, I welcomed the charge and thanked it for protecting me. It took me awhile to genuinely feel a willingness to welcome and embrace the charge; I sat patiently until I felt the willingness. From that place I asked the charge if there was anything it wanted me to know. I felt a source of negative energy in my gut. I directed my awareness to where I felt the discomfort in my body, and again welcomed it. I observed that the energy felt closed, as if sitting inside a balled fist. I asked the charge if it were willing to let go and open up (with the caveat that we could put the fist back if needed). The fist opened and receded, exposing a bulb-shaped receptor. The receptor sat suspended in my gut from a long wire. From that part of my body, I suddenly felt very raw, open, and exposed. The fist served as a source of protection from vulnerability, from pain. With the fist gone, the receptor felt acutely (almost unbearably) sensitive. I asked the receptor what it wanted: to be loved. I assured the receptor that it was loved, by God and by me. It responded “I also want to be loved by others”. I assured the receptor it was okay to want to be loved by others.

After some time sitting raw, exposed, and uncomfortable, I started to feel love flow from some mysterious internal source out of the receptor. I sensed the receptor was receiving God’s love, and channeling it out into the world. My fist had protected the receptor from pain, but had also stopped the flow of love. I eventually settled into the realization that I was meant to sit with this receptor open and exposed, allowing love to flow. On a practical level this meant allowing myself to get vulnerable, sit in the unfamiliar discomfort of feeling exposed to pain, and eventually find strength in the vulnerability. As a result, I’ve been intentionally practicing exposing myself and getting vulnerable publicly, slowly building comfort in the discomfort, strength in the vulnerability. It’s painful but healing work.

More recently I realized that we humans, when we experience love, have a deep and innate desire to capture and hold onto that love. And so we try to build boxes meant to capture the love we experience, in the expectation that we can return to the box and access the love we want when we want it.

The problem: as mentioned above, love exists in a state of flow. The box may very well trap some finite quantity of love inside, but in blocking flow it prevents the replenishment of love. In our return to the box, we begin to draw upon a finite rather than infinite source of love. We don’t notice at first, because there is ample love remaining in the box on the first few visits, and so we feel safer in the presence of the box, knowing *we* have done something tangible to secure our access to love. Over time however, without the capacity for replenishment, the well of love in the box begins to run dry. We experience a crisis: we’ve grown dependent on the box for love, and have forgotten how to live in a state of flow. We delude ourselves into believing love is finite, and panic at the thought our sources might run dry. We’re cut off from the endless ocean of love available to us due to our inability (born of unfamiliarity) to live in flow.

Examples of boxes we create: holding onto relationships that no longer serve us, addiction in any form (chasing the ‘high’ we felt the first time), or stunting the growth of our children out of fear they will grow up and leave us. Basically, any time we clutch onto something that once brought us joy, we create a box that impedes the flow of love in our lives.

To some degree, our institutions are really just boxes we built in an effort to capture and preserve something good. Our media, education system, forms of government, corporate structures, and religions are all boxes designed to capture and protect various ideals. For generations (or centuries, or even millennia) we’ve relied upon these structures for security and protection, increasingly at the cost of allowing ourselves to exist in a state of vulnerability and flow. And so, over time, we have sourced our security and love from these finite sources, not realizing these sources were finite and not realizing the ultimate source of goodness is love, love exists in a state of flow, and the path to replenishing the love in our lives is surrender. In surrender we clear the blockages of fear and sadness, creating the space for love to flow; fortunately the flow returns once the space is cleared, love is infinite, and in flow love expands.

Our species is being invited to rediscover flow. As the boxes (e.g. institutions) we built run dry, we collectively feel the need to replenish the love in our lives. As of now we look, increasingly frantically, to those institutions on which we’ve come to rely. We have yet to understand those institutions were cut off from replenishment the moment they were created, that the very thing that made them feel safe (the reliability of the box) was the same thing which would lead to their ultimate doom (the separation from replenishment via flow), and that we need to return to our natural state of flow in order to feel love and wholeness again. This will be a jarring shift. Such is our invitation.

I love you,

Dad

Trauma

January 31, 2024

Dear Leland and Everett,

Trauma is arguably something of an overused word today, but I think for good reason. We are beginning to understand how our experiences sometimes leave lasting psychological and emotional wounds that impact our ability to function wholly and healthily for the rest of our lives.

When I first started meeting with therapists or even my coach, I felt trepidation they might identify some deep-seated psychological trauma that rendered me damaged and useless. This fear turned out to be mostly ill-founded and ill-informed, but it does touch on something real: we learn coping strategies as children, when we have incomplete tool kits for how to navigate ourselves and the world around us. Often these coping strategies are, as one might imagine, immature. And yet, precisely because we are so young, we forget that these strategies are learned.

The term I’ve adopted is ‘programming’. We develop programs for how we handle certain situations in childhood. As we mature into adulthood, those programs become anachronistic, relics of childhood not really suited for adulthood. Those programs cause or greatly contribute to most of the relationship conflict we experience in life. Whether at work, in my marriage, my friendships, or even when interacting with the two of you, I find that my conflicts are invariably sourced in my programming, and my inability to deviate from these learned behaviors.

What shocks me is how easily we can be traumatized. A good friend of mine claims he spent 40 years deeply wounded by his father telling him as a child, “it’s not good to be weird”. The words themselves are frankly pretty trivial. But my friend knew he was ‘weird’, and liked and appreciated being different from others. Partly he was taken aback by his father’s words. But I suspect it was more. We pick up on the emotional states of those around us, especially as kids and especially from our parents. I suspect my friend’s father uttered the wounding phrase from a state of fear, expressing the father’s wounds in a manner my friend intuitively felt. In the process of reconciling his father’s words with the fear my friend felt emanating from his father, my friend internalized the message that his father could not love nor accept this particular aspect of his son. After internalizing the idea that his father rejected this innate aspect of him, my friend broadened the rejection to mean his father fundamentally rejected he himself. Ultimately, unknowingly, my friend adopted the belief that he was unworthy and fundamentally unloveable. The story he was unloveable became part of my friend’s programming, all because his father projected fears in a misguided attempt to guide or protect.

Of course, my friend’s father had no desire to traumatize his child. He almost certainly just wanted to protect my friend from teasing, from ridicule, from a lifetime of rejection the father’s programming told him came along with being different. Of course, the father was projecting his own fears on my friend, with almost no comprehension of the damage his words and energy would cause.

To be very clear, I hold no judgement nor blame for the father. He was simply doing the best he could with the skills he had. When one possesses only a hammer, we cannot blame them for their inability to perform surgery. As I write this our primary emotional, psychological, and spiritual tools are hammers; I suspect they have been for centuries, or maybe even millennia. The story of Adam and Eve may well be the story of how humans adopted the hammer as the all-purpose tool to wield in the face of uncertainty.

As I learn to heal and unwind the no-longer-useful coping skills I developed in childhood, I watch us (your mother and I) do to you exactly what I am learning to undo to myself. We coach, chide, and scold you. Sometimes we channel far more negative energy than we recognize or admit. And because we are trained to think rationally, not emotionally nor energetically, we lack the practice or sometimes even the vocabulary to understand what it is we are doing. But I’m starting to appreciate that we are energetically channeling our fears into you. You are learning how and what to fear from us; evolutionarily that probably makes sense: if we were teaching you to fear lions, that would undoubtedly help keep you alive. But our nervous systems are designed for a much deadlier world than the one we inhabit, and so we react to more minor concerns as if they were potentially life-threatening. I’ve noticed military veterans tend to struggle adjusting to large corporate environments. Managers and especially executives tend to react to every unfinished task or unwelcome surprise as if lives are at stake; military veterans instinctively know better, having experienced real life-and-death scenarios.

Partly these letters are meant to teach you how to put down your hammers and adopt healthier healing tools. Every fear you can release and every sadness you can process will not only allow you to heal, but prevent you from passing along those wounds energetically to your children and other loved ones. As I alluded here, I have come to believe that our only real mission on earth is to heal ourselves. If we just heal ourselves, we become the invitation to others to heal. In your healing, you set off a chain reaction that can heal the world. You are that important!

How do you heal yourselves? Well that’s an answer with unlimited possibilities, depending on the specifics of your situation. What I can tell you is that 1) you have all the tools you need to heal; 2) if you set the intention to heal, the answers will find you; 3) healing will almost certainly require surrender: your ego will need to surrender the controls to your true self, the self that exists in connection to God and the universe and more intuitive forms of knowing; 4) when in doubt, search your body. Our bodies store memories and other wisdom in ways I cannot fathom, and that science has not yet even attempted to comprehend. I personally believe our bodies are the portal through which we communicate with God; even if my hypothesis is wrong (or too big a leap for you), what I can say with some confidence is that scanning your body invariably yields wisdom that you cannot fully explain, but you know to be true.

How does one access the wisdom contained in the body? Get still. Develop a meditation practice. In the early days, your mind will race incessantly, and you might be tempted to give up in frustration. But your mind racing is not only to be expected, becoming aware that the mind is racing is in fact the initial goal. Until you develop a mindfulness practice, your mind is always racing; it won’t know any other state. In the initial stages of meditation, you will merely develop an awareness of how wild, unpredictable, and unbridled your mind is. Think of an untamed horse: at first, it will merely run; the best solution is not to try to control or contain the horse, but merely to let the horse run itself out. Let your mind race; do not judge or resist, just observe. Note all the images, stories, and fears you see flashing across your awareness. Remind yourself that none of these images are real, or at least not urgent, and just notice what thoughts occupy your mind, fighting for attention. Periodically, as your mind slows, rein it in, thank it and pat it calmly, and enjoy a moment of peace and calm. Soon enough, your mind will start to race again, and you might be tempted to try and hold it in the state of calm; just allow it to race, and go back to noticing the thoughts that emerge. When your mind slows again, rein it in and enjoy another moment of peace.

In your early days, you may not find any moments of peace whatsoever. Soon enough, you will experience a few moments, even if it’s only 30-90 seconds out of a 15-minute meditation. After a year of daily practice (and periodic practice before the past year), I still rarely experience a meditation where my mind doesn’t start off racing. Most days I am able to let the mind race for a few moments before I am able to rein it in and get still; from there I can begin to scan my body. I notice which parts of my body carry tension or discomfort. If I sit with these sensations long enough, I generally find some form of wisdom available to me. Sometimes I explicitly ask the sensation what it wants me to know.

Some days my mind still takes a long time to get still. On these days I typically learn that some event from the day frustrates me more than perhaps I recognized. Now I see my mind racing for what it is: an invitation to recognize, accept, learn from, and appreciate an interaction creating resistance in my mind.

There are other ways to meditate, and other ways to access a deeper form of knowing. I encourage you to explore any and all that work for you. But your body knows more than you do, and your body connects to all the available wisdom and knowledge in the universe. So when in doubt, explore there. And in the process, heal the wounds you experienced in childhood, and witness the chain reaction of healing unfold around you.

I love you,

Dad

All-day coaching experience

January 29, 2024

Dear Leland and Everett,

I spent Saturday with my life coach. You may vaguely recall that I missed your basketball games that day, leaving after breakfast and coming home for dinner. Today I just want to talk about what I experienced.

In a prior letter, I mentioned joining a spiritual group. Since September, we’ve engaged in daily meditations and journaling. Each week our prayers (or meditations; I’m coming to think of those terms interchangeably) center around a theme, including select scriptures. In these exercises, we’ve spent the last couple weeks meditating while pondering Jesus’ baptism and the recruitment of his disciples. Both of these stories resonated with me.

The baptism struck me for two reasons: first, even Jesus needed the support of John the Baptist in completing his transformation. John himself was taken aback, intimating Jesus should be the one baptizing John. But Jesus stood firm. Thus Jesus asked John’s support washing away the old to make space for what was born anew. I spent the last year in a metaphorical cave healing and transforming; now I sense I am being called out of the cave, born anew.

The recruitment of the disciples struck me because the disciples left behind everything they knew: their homes, their lives, their livelihoods, and even their families. I felt particular resonance around the saying goodbye to families; fortunately I do not sense that I am literally leaving my family behind, but I did fear that I am saying goodbye to old aspects of myself to which others might have grown attached (more on this idea in a moment).

Strangely, I scheduled the coaching session weeks ago, long before we pondered the baptism and recruiting of disciples. When I requested an all-day meeting with my coach I only sensed the need to meet, albeit for reasons I did not yet fully comprehend. So it came as some surprise when the purpose of the meeting later revealed itself: to ritualistically wash away the old in order to make space for the new, and to introduce my new self to my coach (as a bit of a first step toward introducing my new self into the world).

Relatively early in the day my coach asked me to do something I instinctively didn’t want to do. I pushed back gently, she challenged me gently. I took a moment to scan myself for why I felt tension. Suddenly it occurred to me. I felt as if I were getting pulled in all directions at once. I laughed, I gazed in astonishment, and then I doubted myself…and then I cycled through those emotions (and probably a few others) a few more times. Finally, I looked at her and said, “Mom, I got this. Let me go”. I’m honestly not sure what those words meant. Was that really a message I feel called to deliver to my mom? Was I channeling my coach’s teenage son? Or was I just talking to some aspect of myself, some inner voice? I honestly don’t know, though I’m starting to suspect the latter (e.g. the inner voice). All I knew then: those words wanted to be expressed in that moment. I proceeded to say something along the lines of “I stand here in my fear of abandonment from my mom, and with my dad’s voice telling me that I don’t fit in this world, saying to you ‘here I am; this is me'”. I felt an immense relief, and still sense I did something fundamental in that moment. It felt like me standing for who I am, who I am meant to be, in a strangely fundamental way. Said differently, despite a lifetime of habits teaching me to take a certain path in that situation, I deliberately if awkwardly chose a different path; in the process I laid a groove that will make choosing the new path easier the next time, and progressively easier each time I take it from now on. Perhaps that moment was my version of ‘saying goodbye to parents in order to follow Jesus’ (although in my version it’s saying goodbye to the fears I hold related to my parents in order to walk in my path).

[One quick callout: I hold no ill will toward my mom and dad, and truly believe I had one of the most privileged childhoods in the world. In a future letter I’ll talk more about how we can acknowledge and even embrace the trauma we learn from or associate with our parents without judging or blaming them. Indeed, taking ownership of our own emotional states helps us humanize and fully embrace and accept and love our parents.]

At some point my coach asked what I felt; “Sadness. I feel sad letting go of those aspects of myself that embedded themselves in my relationships, and that others have learned to hold onto as part of who I am.” My coach had me write down the aspects of myself of which I was ready to let go; I read them aloud and we burned them. She now encourages me to observe a grieving process.

I’m now coming to realize what I think my coach already knew, but helpfully let me figure out for myself: it was never my loved ones preventing me from becoming who I am meant to become. It was always me. My story that *they* might be holding onto old aspects of me was ultimately a voice in my head afraid to let go. My friends and family love me, and will love a new and improved version of me. And while it’s at least possible that some will struggle to accept aspects of the new me, I understand that relationships naturally ebb and flow; people come in and out of our lives, walking in our paths when they are meant to intersect, but separating when our paths are meant to diverge. I can let go (and be sad about letting go) of the need to hold tight to my loved ones, particularly when done out of fear, but more generally whenever it no longer serves us to do so.

Truly loving oneself and loving others are one and the same. When we really know ourselves, we know what we must do, and know that we do so both for ourselves and for others. The idea that we must balance between what we do for ourselves and for others might seem logical, but doesn’t align to how the cosmos ultimately function. The ritual of letting go of the old me has belatedly helped me understand that letting go of the old me wasn’t selfish, and doesn’t sacrifice old relationships; by healing me and being my true self I open my capacity to love others, and invite them into their own healing journey.

We went to a hiking trail with enormous trees; it was breathtakingly beautiful. I could feel nature pulling sadness out of me, creating space for healing. We came upon a huge tree that appeared freshly fallen; it had apparently blown over aided by wet ground, as it uprooted in the act of falling. Soon we came upon another fallen tree. Then another and another; some smaller, but several wider than I am tall. I was struck by the beauty of the death and destruction. First I noticed the grain of the wood bared on a cracked-open tree; the wood was beautiful, the type from which one might build furniture. On another tree I noticed knots deep at the base, near the roots; of these scars I thought, “how beautiful; it’s perfect”. Encountering a tree that had fallen some time ago, with holes, worms, and other critters growing in the rotting wood, I thought “how beautiful; it’s perfect”.

I then realized how my programming teaches me to react differently. My programming tells me that death is bad, and should be avoided. My programming tells me to be sad when I see a fallen tree, and to fear the rot. In that moment I understood on a much more visceral level that while death is inevitable, the pain we experience primarily comes from our resistance. We fight so hard to avoid or prevent death that we inflict unimaginable pain on ourselves in the process of resistance. I thought back to my observations on the Civil War, and how we inflicted unthinkable pain on our country in our resistance toward the death of slavery.

In that moment, not for the first time, I sensed that we live in an era of death and decay. On some level we can all feel the decay, the impending death. But our programming tells us to resist, and so we live in an era of overwhelm and an era where we manifest creatures like Donald Trump so that we might mask or otherwise avoid facing the fear and sadness that accompany death and decay.

Back at her house, my coach asked me to trace the arc of my life, and highlight times when I experienced ‘flow’. What she observed harkened back to something I had shared earlier in the day: my gift appears to be sitting at the intersection of creation and destruction. We noticed that I am gifted at designing the space for others to create; I am also gifted at certain types of creation. I have lots of programming that tells me not to pursue life as a creative. Alas, I think any other path would be inauthentic.

And so, I emerge from the cave, having completed the ritual of washing away (or in my case, burning away) the old, ready to slowly introduce the new me into the world. Ready to accept the possibility of a life expressed in creativity. Ready to live in healing, being the invitation extended toward others to heal themselves. Ready to sit at the intersection of creation and destruction, feeling the waves of emotions that stem from the cycles of death and rebirth. Ready to exist in a state of flow, allowing the universe to express through me.

Over the past year I’ve become a healthier, more whole version of myself. And like I said before I burned the note: I’m ready to let go of all remaining resistance to being authentically me.

I love you both,

Dad

P.S. This morning my coach sent me a podcast about grieving. I thought her encouragement for me to grieve was overblown, but decided to give the podcast a listen; I listen to podcasts at the gym anyway, so this was no major inconvenience. Hearing others tell stories of loss and sadness triggered me almost immediately. I walked around the gym with tears streaming endlessly down my face. After that podcast I listened to another and another, and spent the whole morning cycling through waves of tears and profound sadness.

In today’s meditation just sat with a pain in my chest. I noticed how, despite the pain, I felt a profound sense of beauty. Part of me wanted to sustain and hold onto that feeling. My suspicion is that I don’t really want to hold onto that profound level of sadness so much as I want to retain the ability to access it when needed.

I’ve mourned loss before; in past experiences I’ve associated visual images of the person, place, or thing I was mourning with the feeling of sadness. This was different: I felt the sadness, but didn’t have any clear sense of precisely what I was mourning. I assume I was grieving the parts of me I had ritualistically let go on Saturday…but I’m not sure. Maybe those associations will become more clear over time. Maybe not. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I don’t know.

What I do know: turns out my coach was right, I did need to grieve. Alas.