Tag Archives: Healing

You grow where you are planted

  By liam | July 7, 2015 - 12:41 pm | Healing
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You grow where you are planted. Depending on the environment and and what you are fed greatly influences what you fruit. Being attached and enmeshed, it is hard to see that one is growing in the wrong soil. Not having what you need and unable to ask for it brings, about the wrong fruit (vipāka if you will.) Having grown up in this environment I would like to believe that I can identify when I am in this situation. Time and time again I am proven wrong. Each time though it gets quicker I am able to identify in a much more timely manner that I am in the wrong soil.

I have come to realize that the main question I should be asking in my relationships is “will it feed you?” Is the environment fulfilling, sustaining? The constant interplay of feeding and being feed the give and take is it there, or I am sacrificing who and what I am, like a man on a sinking ship bailing water to keep a float?

Over the past year this thought would come upon me like a cold wave of nausea. Am I being fed? Am I able to feed? The answer was always different, colored, checkered in an array of inter playable justification, self loathing, and, desire for more. This led to yet another road of self discovery. What was it I truly needed? Separating the wants from the desires, The idealization from the truth. Being able to identify emotional needs and separate them from emotional wants is a long hard journey. Environmental factors always played a lot in decisions. Societal ideas always crashing in on the thought process (I blame Disney.) Poor communication skills when expressing emotional needs was also a difficult wall to climb.

What I found to be true is no matter how well you are explaining it. No matter how clear your communication of your needs are, if the person you are talking to does not have the ability to meet them they will not be met. Seems like a simple enough concept to understand, it took me a while to catch on. In the end I learned that we have no control over anything but ourselves. No amount of talking will change this. All you can do is make your case state your needs clearly. If they are met fantastic. If they are not, the responsibility lies with you. What are you going to do to make sure you are getting what you need?

In the right environment people grow. in the wrong environment people can grow even more. At the end of it all however you will not be your best in the wrong soil. You will not produce good fruit unless you are fed what you need to bloom.

Am I being fed? Am I Feeding?

She

  By liam | July 7, 2015 - 11:21 am | Healing
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I Know now. I never saw it before, but I see it now. The fact is I am very much like her,( we react the same way to stress.) I have a peculiar insight into her mind. It only makes sense that our relationship for many years was one of adversity. I never gave her a chance really ,never tried to see things from her perspective. The pain and hurt from her actions were too close too new, even though it had been 20 years. Pain demands to be felt and seems to compound until it is. When not given the space and time for expression it festers, like a septic infection of the soul.

I spent years rehashing and “working” on this with different therapist and counselor. This did give me an intellectual understanding of what I had experienced, and survived but never allowed for the space and the time to feel the hurt that was locked up inside with this scared child. I did not even know it existed.

Years later I have been confronted with her death and it all changed. Although there was and still is a lot of pain from my past, it was not until she passed that I realized (and could drop my defenses) there was a lot of love and caring as well. She (my mother) was a hard woman, who did not really know how to express love. I being young took this poor example and integrated it into my psyche. With this poor idea of love, I existed under the incorrect perception that she just did not love. Instead of the truth she did not know how to show it well. There was little to no forgiveness in my heart for this woman who had spent seventeen years of her life taking care of, and loving me the only way she knew how.

Now She has passed and I am left with a cacophony of emotion. Love, hate, forgiveness, justification, and understanding all vortex through my core. I see now how this mistaken perception of love has tainted everything in my life. I see now the healing that needed to take place. This pain that has demanded to be felt for the last 30 years, is now so close to the surface of my life that it can no longer be ignored. I am here and now, I have to face it, walk with it, feel it, and learn to love it. I know that it will not lessen until I do.

Death clears all scoreboards

  By liam | July 7, 2015 - 10:47 am | Recovery
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Death clears all scoreboards. In the light of never seeing someone again, or feeling them, most things we keep score about seem very small and insignificant. It’s hard to see when you are in it, and they are alive. The hurts and expectations of change are all there, and strong brimming and bubbling right at the surface of our awareness. If they would just do this, or say that. Why can’t they just….

Truth is most people don’t change. Not the way we feel they should. It’s the expectation of change that causes pain and lack of healing. I refused to deal with and accept my own pain around the situation until they did, what I felt they should. My dear old friend hindsight pays me a visit once more. For when I look back I can see now that it really is all small shit. The hurts and pains that I have carried with me where just that; carried by me. I lacked acceptance and in that I lacked forgiveness.

There is no time to lose, in this world time is a cruel and fickle mistress and she will not stop. Lessons learned over and over are painful and pointent of my refusal to heal old wounds. There is no one who can do it but me. Time to walk once again.

The problem with shiny

  By liam | November 24, 2013 - 2:43 pm | Dharma
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The problem with shiny is that it’s usually sharp. When I was a young boy around Christmas I became enamored with one of the glass ornaments on the tree. It was one of those thin glass red foiled ones.  I ran up and grabbed it off the tree and in my excitement, and, zeal of the moment I grasped it very tightly. The sound was really what I remember most like thin ice cracking on a lake with that high pitch “Tink” sound. The next thing I noticed  was the blood, pain, and, the shattered ornament in my hand. I have the scar to this day. It cut me deep in the fleshy part of my hand.  The significance of the lesson was lost on me at that young age.

As I got older there was many more shiny distraction, Beautiful people, and things in my life I destroyed by grasping too hard at them. The lessons where all lost on me then, as well. It took me many years to realize the truth of attachment,  grasping, and, the suffering that it causes in our lives. It took me many years to even see, that I needed to work on balance in my life.

Finally twenty seven years into life I had broken, crushed , and destroyed just about all the shiny in my life there was no shiny left for me to grasp.  I was very fortunate to have had such a great opportunity to change my relationship to life and to walk a spiritual path.  I am grateful to have had such great teachers that have taught me that the root of all suffering is attachment.

One of the greatest and worst things about this samsara is that all things are impermanent and depending on my relationship to this fact, it can either be a freeing truth or a bone crushing juggernaut of suffering, It is all my choice . I have the choice to train my mind, I have the choice to live the eightfold path today. I rarely grasp tight enough to break things now ( and for this I am extremely grateful ) but grasping and attachment will always be something I have to work on, I think that may be the point who knows. What I do know is that when I am practicing equanimity, I can serve the greater good in any situation without much work on my part. The work was already put in through daily practice before the causes and conditions came together.  It is through a daily meditation practice That I am able to compassionately and skillfully react to situations in my life.

Non attachment is a hard practice and I am not so sure I am any good at it but I try and each time I get a little better.

Lean Into Your Rough Edges

  By liam | November 18, 2013 - 2:15 pm | Anger, Motivation, Recovery
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Lean into your rough edges. That has stuck with me lately, it’s kind of been a ‘theme’ if you will. In the time I have been walking my path I have had plenty of opportunities to lean into my edges; many “Buddhas in disguise” moments and many opportunities for practice. However, there have been a few rather large moments in my practice that have really encouraged me to continue on, moments where it has seemed almost effortless. Moments in my life that point to the truth that the Dharma is working and I am ripening, just as the sutas say.

One of these moments was about three years into my practice. I had gotten a call from my mother and she explained that my cousin David’s wife Debbie had passed from a brain hemorrhage (she was only in her mid 40’s), and that David was quite understandably destroyed.

Now to truly understand the story you will have to know the history behind David and I. David was one of my abusers when I was growing up, and I had a deep and undying hatred for this man for many years. This hatred extended towards Debbie as well, as she had also been one of my abusers. Lucky for me, through the process of the twelve steps and my daily Dharma practice I was able to forgive them. Although I had forgiven them, the well spring of love and well wishing was not there for them in my heart – and understandably so.

So my mother telling me this news about Debbie, and David’s obvious suffering over it had a very unexpected effect on me. My reaction surprised me as much as I think it surprised my mother, because she knew the feelings I had towards the two of them. The first words out of my mouth were “Is he ok? Is there anything I can do for him?”. The feeling of empathetic sadness for this man washed over me and I felt nothing but love and compassion for him in that moment. I truly meant what had just come out of my mouth. This healing of the heart was effortless, I had only to meditate and try to follow the dharma as best I could and naturally it was this that came about.

Another one of these times happened ten years into my practice. I had just recently moved back to the Coachella Valley (where I had grown up) to take a job that was more in line with my spiritual goals. I went to one of the Insight Community of the Desert‘s weekly meetings and dharma talk. Larry Yang was speaking and it was a good meditation session. During the dharma talk, I thought “hey, i might know someone here“, scanned the crowd, and there I saw a man who I could just barely recognize as my ex father-in-law Jim.

Getting married very young and having a child at the age of seventeen was not one of the best life choices I have ever made, and I am sure this choice did not make my wife at the time’s parents happy either. Jim was always polite to me in a cold and curt manner but he did try and help me and Anne out when we were kids.

Jim is a Buddhist, and one of the ones that made a bit of a difference in my life although not through his actions but his examples. He held a weekly sangha meeting at his house and I remember a few times hearing them chant. Something in the sounds of the chanting deeply resonated in me. I was drawn to dharma in all its forms all my life. I remember asking Jim about Buddhism and he responded by handing me a Tao Te Ching. I have that book to this day. However, it explained nothing about Buddhism. Looking back and knowing Jim the way I did, it makes perfect sense why he handed me this book when I asked about Buddhism. I don’t think I would have wasted the time explaining it to me back then either, knowing that my mind state was nowhere close to where it needed to be in order to understand the concepts of the Dharma. Giving me a book to read that was very eastern philosophical and kind of esoteric (for a seventeen year old kid who was raised in the desert and sheltered from any sort of culture such as this) was a good way to put me on a path of some sort without actually having to put the time and energy into something he felt was a lost cause.

After the ugly separation of me and my wife and some very (what I felt at the time) unskillful and hurtful actions on Jim and Sandy’s (Anne’s mother) part, I was embittered with the family. Nine years later Anne and I were in court for custody and visitation of my daughter, and Jim wrote very scathing letters to the courts as to why my character was of poor quality and why I should not be allowed to see my daughter or be in her life. This left me feeling very angry and somewhat hurt.
Knowing that resentment like this can eat away my core and even kill me. I spent a full year doing metta and forgiveness practices with Jim and Sandy as the focus. After the year passed I had fully put down the resentment and gone on with my life.

So after seven years there sits Jim and his husband Jim across from me at this dharma function in Palm Springs and all I could feel for this man when I searched my feelings was love, compassion, and, gratitude for what he had done for me when I was younger. All this with no effort on my part and no reasoning, just pure responsive metta and mudita from my heart space. The feeling was amazing and encouraging, and it is times like these that I know that all I have to do is keep walking, and I know that if I put in the work, anger, greed, and delusion will naturally fall away.

Six Days on the Inside

  By liam | June 1, 2013 - 2:00 pm | Dharma, Motivation
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On the last day of retreat with Noah Levine, he had the practitioners write something about our experience. This is what I wrote.

Day 1: Man, trees are really fucking tall!
Day 2: In this moment, it’s like this.
Day 3: Wait! It took seven years of sobriety, three years of daily meditation practice, two years of therapy, and three days of intensive meditation to figure that out? Really?!!
Day 4: Am I having a heart attack?
Day 5: My body knows what to do, I should trust it.
Day 6: It will never cease to amaze me how you can come to love and appreciate twenty five people – most of whom you have never met – in the span of six days without saying a single word to them.

Freedom If you want it

  By liam | February 1, 2013 - 1:28 am | Recovery
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Growing up the way I did left me angry and bitter at the whole world around me. The survival skills I had adopted not only kept people who would hurt me away. They also cut off any help that would come my way. It was constantly not what I felt I needed or wanted. I always ended up trying to depend on them too much or demanding total control.

Time and time again I would smack people’s hands away. Eventually people stopped trying to help. That only fueled me more. ” How dare they not help me! Cant they see I am in pain ? Why won’t you help me ? ” It was a constant game of screaming ” Everyone just leave me alone!!” Anyone? Hello ?” A constant cycle of me pushing people away and then blaming them for leaving. It was a lonely miserable existence but one of my own making. Sure I did not get the ball rolling that was my early experiences in life’s job. However I am the one who chose to keep it rolling. Time and time again I would Alienate all who cared all who wanted to help.

The cycle was a deep rooted one and took many years for me to break. First I had to look at these situations and see where my part in them was. No matter what the situation was. Whether I felt I had a right to be angry or not. Whether it really was something shitty that happened. I had to look at all the incidents that I was reliving daily. The ones that where rotting me out from the inside. I had to find my part where I might be to blame and see how I could have done this better. In the incidents where I found no real wrong on my part I had to find forgiveness for their part. In fact in all incidents in my life I had to find forgiveness. It was the only way I found to true freedom from the past.

Finding this forgiveness was not easy in many of these situations. I found it easier if I was able to put myself in their shoes see it from there point of view. Then I could have empathy and compassion, For most of the time my abusers lived through the exact pain I did and once again it was that pain that allowed me to identify, care for and come to love my abusers . Some of them only enough to see what pain had done to them. In others it allowed me to love them with all my heart and soul again whether I allowed them back in my life or not. It was my love for them that freed me from my suffering .

My chains have always been of my own making no matter the cause. Experience gives me the raw material and I have the choice to either build chains and a cage over my heart or to use this material to build a stairway to freedom. To use the pain to block out all things that would help me leaving me isolated and alone or take that pain and use it as a spring board for growth.

We are all entrusted with a certain amount of pain in our lives it is unavoidable. Some more than others. I believe the point to all this pain is to be the touchstone of growth. To give us something to make us uncomfortable. I have found for me at least that I do not just decide to change things it takes a certain amount of pain to motivate me. To move me enough to realize something has to change. As I get stronger in my practice I am able to see the need for change with less and less suffering. I am becoming more sensitive to the things on my life that are ear marks for change. For this I am grateful. It no longer takes a building falling on me for me to realize its time to change now it only takes a house. One day I hope for a small shed or fence. We shall see.

My life with Ani Difranco

  By liam | February 1, 2013 - 1:20 am | Recovery
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Let me start out this by saying. I have always listened to Ani Difranco. Growing up in the area I did every ooh rah chick I knew listened to Ani as some kind of Affirmation of being a strong women. Me being a man, I did feel a little odd listening to Ani and enjoying it as much as I did. No big deal however I was ok with this.

It was not until the end of a particularly rough five year relationship with a girl. A relationship that had been rough due to my own actions and inability to change them at the time. See I had this habit of putting anything and everything in my body and treating everybody and anybody who gave a shit about me like dog shit. Ya weird habit I know. After five years of this you can see why she would want to move on to someone who actually treated her like a human being. Much less someone who was actually nice to her and knew how to express love. So there I was alone again and feeling oh so sorry for poor little ole me. Some where in all this I had missed where I was wrong. Some where in all this I had missed my own actions.

Now this girl who left loved Ani Difranco to a Crazy degree. Used to have discussions with me on how Ani had Changed her life and made her see things in a different way. So in the midst of all this feeling sorry for my self and drinking a shit load I was reorganizing my cd’s and came across the ani block of things. I found little plastic castles and put it in.

The first song is As is. I remember just sitting and really listening to the lyrics for the first time. It was an odd juxtapose for me sitting there listening to that song. Normally when you listen to
“break up “ sad music you are the singer at least that’s how it works for me. I identify with what the singer is saying belting out righteous lyrics, Declaring my indignation and hurt, but oh how I will survive and be stronger in the long run. However this was not what was happening at this point. It was if Ani was singing about me and suddenly it dawned on me I was an asshole. In that moment I was hearing the other persons side of things. For the first time in my life I realized that other people mattered too. “Just give up and admit your an asshole. “ That lyric stuck in my head. Could it be that easy just admit I was wrong ?

Through out that night I listened to every Ani album I had. Every song about Failed relations and lost love forced me to think more and more where I had been at fault in the past .Every lyric of how hard she tried to save something that was unsolvable cut me deep and forced me into further introspection.
I could finally see that as humans all we really want to be is happy. I saw that we are deserving of that happiness. I finally saw that I could not achieve my happiness at the expense of others. All simple things that had eluded me over the years. I was inundated with all the shit I had pulled in the past and had no where to put it all.

That one night changed my life forever. You see, because the universe has a sense of humor for sure. The next night I ended up in An alcoholics anonymous meeting with a friend. I was there to support him He felt a bit nervous going there alone. It was a book study and we all got to read. When It came time for me to read I started right where the person before me left off and I read out loud. “ After a few years with an alcoholic a wife gets worn out, resentful and uncommunicative. How could she be anything else.” and there again Ani was there pointing out her side of things and I listened. It was in that moment I realized What I needed to do but with out the ground work that was laid the night before I probably would have never been receptive enough to realize what was being said to me. Through the words of Bill Wilson and the first one hundred drunks. In the book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Fast forward 8 years and life is great I am better and always trying to change and grow for the better. Funny how it all start from one long night of introspection. Just me and Ani. Her pointing it out and me acknowledging it and wanting it to change.

Reflections

  By liam | January 31, 2013 - 11:21 pm | Dharma
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In the ten years I have really been a committed practitioner of the dharma. I say it like this because most of my life I have been a Pseudo follower of the dharma but never really wanted to give up any of my shiny Samsaric Distractions drugs, sex, and alcohol you name it I liked it and wanted to keep it. So ten years ago I was at the end of my rope. I had truly hit bottom my life looked very close to a demilitarize zone and there was a lot of suffering. I had a moment of clarity where I saw things as they really where and I decide to make a change. I got sober.

Sobriety presented me with a new challenge I had to come to believe that there was something out there greater than me then I had to allow this conception of a higher power to guide my life. This was no small feat but with the help of guys who had done it before me and step work this came. At first I used my mother’s conception of a higher power as it was what I was raised with. Then it started to evolve into what it is today.

One of the things I had to do was pray and meditate. I remember the first Time I meditated I sat for about 3 mins it seemed like a life time my head was so loud it scared me and I was crawling out of my own skin. I decided then that prayer was enough and I needed not look to meditation too much. My karma had other ideas. The damage I had done to my brain through years of abuse had caused me to have clinical anxiety. That is I would have crippling anxiety attacks, to the point of complete disassociation and being in full flight or fight mode for no reason. This would happen three to four times a week and would last up to two hours. Sometimes a slow build all day then bang full blown attack sometimes just out of nowhere boom cold, sweat dry throat, fear and knowing I was going to die fearing it to my core. Making up all kinds of stories and reasons why this was going to happen. I would often fixate on death dying, what happens after, will it hurt, you name it. Anything that was completely out of my control and needed a level of acceptance, a level of acceptance I did not at the time have.

I went a doctor and he suggested I take a benzodiazepine this solution was completely unacceptable to me. I knew me far to well and I knew if I started taking a pill to cure my problems and change my perception it would only be a matter of time before I was drinking and using drugs again. He offered me the prescription and I told him no thanks. It was a hard decision to make the attacks seemed like they were destroying my life. I despaired about it for a while but came to the resolve that crippling anxiety attacks four times a week was still better than the horror and pain my life was before I got sober. I was not about to jeopardize my sobriety for any amount of “easy road”.

On one such occasion I was walking to my apartment and it hit me out of nowhere it was one of the strongest attacks I have had even to this day. The terror that filled me was unbearable I thought my heart was going to explode. My mind ran rampant with thoughts of death and dying and I knew this was it. I did the only thing I could think of in the moment. I had presence of mind enough to know that if I did not die here, this was going to end. So I sat down, closed my eyes, started to breath, and counted my breath it was a technique my friend Fa Jun had talked about at a coffee shop years before. As I sat there counting my breath the story in my head slowed and I started to notice that the attack albeit was not gone but somehow more manageable. Now I was just dealing with what was, my heart was racing, I was in a cold sweat, and I felt as if my throat was in the desert. However the story I was creating about all this physical phenomena was gone and that took most of the power away. I got up and looked at my watch it had only taken ten minutes to halt the attack to a point where I could walk and manage my life. By the time I made it to my apartment about five minutes later it was over and gone like a dream.

It was then I realized the immense benefit of meditation in my life. I started a daily meditation practice as best I could. I would close my eyes and count my breath in the morning sun while I filled the pools at the apartment complex I worked at. If I had an anxiety attack I would go sit down and meditate. This went on for many years prayer and meditation had become a cornerstone of my life. After three years I rarely had an attack and if I did it was easily managed once I identified it I knew what to do.
At three years sober I was able to locate my daughter and moved to Washington to be closer to her. This in itself is a whole story I will write about later. Once I moved to Washington I had left my entire support group in AA all the guys I had gotten sober with All the people that knew me I left it all to come out to Washington and be a dad.

Now at the time I had no worries about this because I knew all I had to do was go to meetings out here and find a new support group. No problem right? Well funny thing about attachment and the mind it seemed to me like they just did not do AA right out here. The meetings to me where horrid no one wanted to talk to me or even seemed to care one way or the other if I was new and needing a support group. I would share I am new and have expectations that someone would invite me to at least fellowship after the meeting and no one did. Looking back now I realize that I forget I am a six foot four two hundred and twenty pound man with a bald head and covered in tattoos. I am not the most approachable if you don’t know me. Plus with the problems I was having at home with my girlfriend at the time, that had moved from California to wa with me. I was finding it increasingly harder to go to the same meeting with any type of frequency to actually have people get to know me. So I did what any good Alcoholic does I copped resentment and stopped going to meetings for almost a year.

I still continued to pray and meditate, I still continued to read out of my book but this was not enough. I eventually got so miserable I started begrudgingly going back to meetings. It was not the same I did not like it but I got a sponsor and worked my steps again but something was missing. After about A year I was still miserable and unfulfilled I was doing everything I knew how to do and nothing was working. I knew drinking would not solve anything but I did not know what else would. I was once again at a spiritual bottom this time in sobriety. I was scared and in a lot of pain but this time I could not think of a way out.

One day I got a call from a friend and he told me a spiritual teacher I had great respect for was going to be in town doing a day long and a dharma talk and I should go. So I did I went to the Dharma talk and listened to Noah Levine speak of the Dharma and of a way out of suffering. It was all stuff I had heard before I knew of the four noble truths, I knew of the eightfold path I read a lot about the dharma and studied a lot in my search for a stronger meditation practice. This time however it really clicked and for the second time in my life I knew what I had to do. Bill Wilson stated in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous that if we did not continue to expand our spiritual practice we would drink. That’s what I had forgot to do expand my spiritual practice

The next day I sat with Noah at a daylong in Seattle it was painful to sit that long but I did it. We would sit thirty minutes and walk thirty minutes. Somewhere in all of this I had a huge revelation a feeling of this is what I need to do washed over me. Almost as if I had remembered what I was supposed to do with my life. It all seemed so natural and easy even the pain was just that, pain. It was what it was. Nothing was wrong it just was. In my life, in my practice, in AA, in my relationship, it was not wrong it just was. I had been labeling everything good bad or indifferent so long I was once again making a prison for myself with my own interoperations of event that where just happening.

After that day I threw myself in to spiritual practice with great zeal and somewhat of reckless abandon. I joined a weekly meditation group in Tacoma and did everything I could to help and make sure it stayed alive. I started meditating and going to a WAT that was out here I even started going to more meetings and actually bringing something to them instead of taking or having expectations of what I thought the meeting should be doing for me.

For the most part my life improved greatly. Internally I was feeling better I was growing spiritually and beginning to understand my purpose here in samsara. However my partner she was not feeling the spiritual wave. I tried everything I could to integrate her with my spiritual practice offered to bring her to the WAT to the Sakya an AA meeting anything I tried to get her to meditate with me, to no avail however. This simply was not her path and she did not like the idea of it taking my time from her. she already had to share my time with my daughter , work and AA this seemed to be the last straw and she would not have it.

Over the next two years my spiritual practice grew and my relationship declined very badly. Instead of dealing with this fact I chose to just do more spiritual practice in hopes it would work out. Eventually our fights got so out of control. I felt I needed to seek outside help and went back to a therapist for help with my anger and inability to deal with this side of things in an adult loving and compassionate manner. It seemed I could be kind loving and compassionate to all others in my life except for this woman who had been there for me so many times before.

I learned a lot from my Dr. Most of all I learned that sometimes things are not broken there just over and there is nothing you can do to fix them just accept it and move on. I eventually got enough courage up to end the relationship it was a rocky, bumpy, painful and awkward journey to say the least but it had to be done and I learned a lot about myself and my habitual habits along the way.

Through all of this my practice and reliance on the Dharma has grown.