As of late, I’m on a journey that I don’t understand.  It appears as if I am healing early, early wounds – when my power was taken from me through fear and intimidation.  In those early days my sensitivity picked up on the unconscious world around me, and was terrified that the ship was sinking.  Safety meant disconnecting, and doing whatever it took to please the giants.  I took on the mantra, “I can not fail . . . or I will not survive.”

Fast forward to adulthood and I’m on a team of 16 players from the Brookside men’s golf club playing against another team.  I’m feeling disconnected and not knowing why.  The feeling as I putt is, “I cannot fail, or I will not survive.”  The old scenario has reappeared in different clothing.  The result was of course failure for 9 holes.  No one can putt or succeed under the conditions that they have no room for failure.  Once my singles match was lost I was free to work with my partner in the team match.  Suddenly I was reconnected and sinking all the big putts . . . fear was gone and I was putting to make the putt rather than not to fail.

We had a week before our next matches and I had some time to reflect on the early childhood fear that had been projected onto the present.  I did some grieving, sat with it, got real clear on the fact that nothing I do on the green today can change anything that happened back on Cambridge Ave. in Phoenix, Arizona where I grew up.

The next week I went out and to my surprise there was no censor inside my head or body telling me to be tentative.  There were no conditions, no result that could be achieved other than just putting the ball into the hole and enjoying that moment for what it was.  And of course the putts were falling, I felt completely fearless.

The question for me lately has been, How can I do this more in my life? The sensation of being free of those early childhood binds was like being let into Disneyland for the first time.  And I’m not sure if I can even take credit for the healing.  It was like something had been “lifted” from me.  Sure, my availability to making the connections helped, but I’ve been trying to shake this monkey for a long, long time.

Here are a couple thoughts from Joseph Campbell (from The Power of Myth) on ego transcending and its place in the spiritual quest.

“For to experience this sense of compassion, accord, or even identity with another, or with some ego-transcending principle that has become lodged in your mind as a good to be revered and served, is the beginning once and for all, of the properly religious way of life and experience; and this may then lead to a life-consuming quest for a full experience of that one Being of beings of which all temporal forms are the reflections.”

“When life comes into being, it is neither afraid nor desiring, it is just becoming.  Then it gets into being, and it begins to be afraid and desiring.  When you can get rid of fear and desire and just get back to where you’re becoming, you’ve hit the spot.”

I was given the opportunity to witness a filming of an episode of The Dog Whisperer in Burbank, CA at the home of a newly married couple.  The guy had been a baseball player in high school and was now in the insurance field . . . so a pretty well built guy.  The couple had two rescue dogs, one of which was skittish, so they asked for  help in getting the dog back to balance.

Cesar did his usual interview with the couple probing all the possibilities and reasons for the dog’s behavior.  After about 15 minutes the cameras were shut off and Cesar looked at the director and said, “Ok, is there anything else?”  The director looked at the dog owner and said, “Yes, why don’t you tell Cesar about that one other thing.”

The cameras turned back on and the owner told Cesar about a lifelong fear.  “I’ve always been afraid of pitbulls.  Every other dog I feel like I can handle, but a pit bull . . . I just feel like if he wanted to he could overpower me.”

Cesar’s eyes lit up, “When I work with dogs, I have no fear.  None.  Dogs view fear as weakness and they will not give you trust after that.  You’re saying, ‘This is what I want, I just want to be afraid of pit bulls.’  The problem you see is that compromises your ability to be a good pack leader (Cesar is referring to a broader sense of pack as in his family, employees and clients).  If you take the attitude that I am not going to allow myself this fear for the good of the pack, then you will have no problems with pit bulls.  They’ll see it right away and they won’t be aggressive toward you.  Selfish is a very weak place to be.  Fear often turns into anger for humans and that’s often the thing that takes us out of balance.  The way you transform the fear is by going through it.  You have to put yourself back into the situation that causes you the most fear and go through it this time with a calm assertive state.  The challenge is an opportunity to transform.  You change fear with knowledge.  We’ll have to get you around some pitbulls to work on this.  Dogs are amazing teachers because they’re so forgiving.  But once you get over this fear it can transform your life.  The way we treat animals is the way we treat people.”

What could the guys say except . . . “Yeah, let’s do it.”

So hopefully we’ll see the episode in a month or two.  But again what’s so refreshing about Cesar’s approach is that he has none of the European intellectual filters about processing emotions.  It’s all so instinctual.  I’m not negating any of Jungian approach to finding the source of where the fears come from and dealing with fear there.  But to watch Cesar model this connected, gut level approach to everything, I must say, it causes my spirit to soar just a little bit each time I see it.

Today’s entry can be found on The Huffington Post at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-witzeman/addiction-why-we-bark-up_b_419162.html

Some more thoughts:

I was on the golf course last week and one of the guys I was playing with made the comment, “I hope I never grow up.”  And I thought, “wow, that’s what I used to think . . . until it STOPPED WORKING.” Carl Jung has a beautiful description of the dilemma:

“Something in us wishes to remain a child; to be unconscious, or, at most, conscious only of the ego; to reject everything foreign, or at least subject it to our will; to do nothing or in any case indulge our own craving for pleasure or power.”

And then the problem:

“Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto.  But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning – for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”

I get from Jung’s analysis that the real work seems to be to make some kind of a daily effort to extricate myself from the past.  That seems to be a matter of connecting with all the ego’s schemes of willing and striving and then trying to turn it over to God as best I can.  Ultimately it seems I have good days and bad days with that turning over thing.  But so far “contributing to the planet” seems like a pretty good mantra to make the shift.

This week’s post actually got picked up by the Huffington Post so here’s the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-witzeman/aa-the-magic-of-bill-wils_b_359534.html

The story of the birth of AA is truly amazing for so many reasons.   That mankind went through centuries without an answer to addiction and then the floodgates opened . . . makes me glad to be born when I was.

It was January 24^th, 1991.  I was filming a guest star role opposite my childhood idol, Dick Van Dyke in an episode of Jake and the Fatman.  The show was to become a spinoff with Mr. Van Dyke in the lead role as a doctor and myself and others as medical students.  There were some hushed discussions going on at lunch amongst the excited actors about how this was “it.”  This was the opportunity every actor dreamed of.  No, not the chance to work opposite Dick Van Dyke . . . the chance to gravy train our way into a working role that could take us to stardom.  I played “Student #1” and the scene went as follows:

Stone (Van Dyke’s character):  While you’re waiting for Dr. Matousek to begin your biology class, I thought I’d give you the opportunity to talk to a real, live patient who’s preparing for an ultrasound.  (to Mrs. Clark)  How do you feel, Mrs. Clark?

Mrs. Clark:  (somewhat crabby) I just drank a quart and a half of water.  I feel like I’m going to burst.

Stone:  (to class) What can we learn from this, class?

The students look at each other.  ONE of them raises his hand.

Student #1:  Old people are crabby?

Mrs. Clark:  (angry)  Crabby?  Who’s crabby.  And who are you calling old?

Stone:  You can see that the patient, quite rightly, objects to being treated like a stereotype . . . (followed by some moral lesson on understanding your patients.)

It was the kind of smart aleck remark that was good for a chuckle at best.  But in my mind, it was going to change the world, a chance in front of a national TV audience to show my stuff.  Up until this point I had done a bunch of national commercials including a Miller Genuine Draft Super Bowl commercial, but this was the segue into episodic television that I needed.

There were 3 large panavision cameras filming the scene (close up, mid range and wide) in a room with about 50 people comprised of cast and crew.  Dick was filmed first delivering his lines like an old pro.  Our witty back and forth felt natural without a trace of nerves for either of us.  Then the director yelled, “OK, lets turn the cameras.”  All of a sudden, the 3 giant behemoths turned their macro lenses at me.  This was it.  This was MY big moment.  Seemingly before I could catch my breath, the director yelled, “ACTION.”  The room went silent.  All eyes were on me.  Dick says, “What can we learn from this class?”  OLD PEOPLE ARE CRABBY!!!!!

It came out like a civil war cannon, loud and lacking any subtlety whatsoever.  The room went silent again . . . as if someone had died.  The director quietly kneeled down beside me.  “OK, Jeff let’s do it just like in the audition, very relaxed, almost throwing the line away.”  We did it one more time, but I had no more chance of “casually throwing the line away” than Joe Liebermann would of voting his conscience.  I blurted the line out again taking it down from maybe a 10 to a 9.9.

The director kind of looked down, weighing his disappointment with the workload still to get in before nightfall, and yelled, “OK, next scene.”  I was dismissed got in my car and drove away going, “What just happened???”

It would take me years to realize the significance of that event . . . or even laugh at it.  Call it the destructive power of the ego, call it my watershed moment, but it was really my introduction to adulthood.  This is where dreams met reality.  What I would come to learn was that all those years of childhood neglect and abandonment had created a monster that said, “Someday I’ll get it all back from the validation I get on T.V. and Film.”  But life doesn’t work that way as whatever you missed in childhood stays there.  Then comes adulthood with a new set of rules and a new set of opportunities.  I’m forever grateful to the debacle with Dick Van Dyke though for a number of reasons all relating to the new world order.

First, the event redefined the spiritual path for me.  I gave up the “save the world” version and realized there was a whole inner world that needed saving.  There was an awful lot of pain inside that needed to come out and be accepted.  Then there was the unpleasant reality of my avoidance of that pain and the compulsive addictive behavior it produced.

Maybe best of all was the discovery that I often think I know what I want.  I make plans and create elaborate schemes to make something become a reality only to find out it was something that took me further away from myself. Asking for the knowledge of God’s will and the power to carry that out, didn’t sound like such a bad idea after all.

The show aired but the spinoff never happened.  My scene ended up on the cutting room floor.  Still, the lesson I learned that day was priceless.  Some people never get a day of reckoning that abruptly shoots them into some kind of authentic spiritual journey.  The naïve faith from before would now transform to a search for the inner life and a relationship with the spirit I had never known.

Carl Jung

Jim Rome on his popular sports talk show once commented on his confusion over the term “sex addiction.”  “C’mon, what guy isn’t a sex addict?  It’s part of being a man.”

Carl Jung didn’t call it sex addiction, but he did talk about the dilemma of sexual obsession back in the 30’s.  He also differentiated himself from Sigmund Freud in how to deal with it.  Here are some excerpts from Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

“Beyond all question, there is a marked disturbance today in the realms of sexual life . . . an over-emphasized sexuality piled up behind a dam; and it shrinks at once to normal proportions as soon as the way to development is opened.  It is being caught in the old resentments against parents and relations and in the boring emotional tangles of the family situation which most often brings about the damming-up of the energies of life . . . (it) shows itself as that kind of sexuality which is called “infantile.”  It is really not sexuality proper, but an unnatural discharge of tensions that belong to quite another province of life.    This being so, what is the use of paddling about in this flooded country?  It is important to open up drainage canals.  We should try to find, in a change of attitude or in new ways of life, that difference of potential which the pent-up energy requires.  Freudian psychology – points no way that leads beyond the inexorable cycle of biological events.  This hopelessness would drive one to exclaim with Paul: “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me . . .” There is nothing that can free us from this bond except that opposite urge of life, the spirit.  It is not the children of the flesh, but the “children of God” who know freedom.”

There are a couple of things that really jump out at me.

First of all the problem is not that his patient is a deviant and needs to be reformed.  Jung frames the problem as the damming up of the energies of life as a result of resentments that haven’t been dealt with.  Once the resentments surface, one can try to find a change of attitude. Then once the energies can find a useful purpose, the patient can be freed.  That is a significantly different spiritual model than the old, pray more, to fix your problem.

Traditional religious practices haven’t emphasized becoming conscious of resentments as a way to enlightenment.  Bill Wilson when he started AA made it the penultimate step to recovery and a spiritual solution to addiction in step 4: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” which among other things means making a list of fears and resentments.

Second, I like Jung’s strategy for the big picture – “try to find, in a change of attitude or in new ways of life, that difference of potential which the pent-up energy requires.”  He doesn’t advocate trying to necessarily fix or get even with the resentments.  He also doesn’t think we’re trapped with them or the acting out behavior.  Once the work is underway to make the resentments conscious, one is free to return to “spirit and nature,” as he puts it.

Later in the chapter he writes, “We moderns are faced with the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit; we must experience it anew for ourselves.  It is the only way in which we can break the spell that binds us to the cycle of biological events.”

Break the spell . . .  I’m working on it Carl . . . now if only the Dodgers could break the Phillies spell I’d be a happy man.

As a young adult I used to see pictures of Hindu and eastern religious art and be shocked at the pictures of the gods with their 8 arms and dragon faces.  “They’re all going straight to hell,” I’d think.  LOL.  But as I’ve gotten older and seen the confusion in my own life as to how to resolve the various parts of myself, I’ve come to respect much of what these other cultures try to do.  In many ways their depth blows away my uptight Midwestern culture with its attempt to keep a lid on anything threatening.

Joseph Campbell made a life of studying myths in other cultures and as he put it, “they liberated my faith.”  Campbell had a Catholic upbringing and ‘til his dying day enjoyed communion as a way of feeling oneness with God.  But he found his faith bound by limitations – clergy being stuck on the ethics of good and evil versus illuminating the Biblical narrative as metaphors to the inner life, childish ways of thinking — like creationism, an environment where people were directed to live inauthentic lives, never doing a thing they truly wanted because so called “supernatural laws” required them to live as directed by their clergy.  He would later feel that every religion was true when understood metaphorically.  As he studied the myths from around the world he related to their thrust — the maturation of the individual from dependency through adulthood, maturity to exit.

Here’s a few of his takes on various traditions that I found fascinating:

“‘All life is sorrowful’ is the first Buddhist saying and so it is.  It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow – loss, loss, loss.  You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it.  I will participate in this game.  It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.”

“Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us.  This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C.  All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us.”  The metaphor being that we needn’t look outside ourselves for either excitement or the cause of our problems.  We create our problems by reacting to the outside world from what’s inside us.  If the problem’s out there, we’re in trouble, because we can’t change it.  If it’s in here . . . we can not only fix it, we can draw from the connection to God that exists.

From the Bible, the Garden of Eden is a metaphor for oneness with God and a place of unity.  It is a place of non-duality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings.  The moment we “eat of the knowledge of good and evil,” we thrust ourselves into the world of duality, most prominently fear and desire.  This can have some very damaging consequences if we stay there without getting back to the garden.  That’s the benefit of meditation, to be removed from the duality and get back to the oneness.

And finally here’s one to try on next time you talk to God.  Ramakrishna said that if all you think of are your sins then you’re a sinner.  To which Campbell thought Catholic confession is all backwards.  One should actually go in the booth, shut the door, and say, “Bless me Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week.”

But in order to make this switch from ego to spirit, a major shift has to happen.  Carl Jung talks about this shift when he describes the stages of life. He uses the metaphor of life being like the rising and setting of the sun.  If birth is rising and death is setting, then just before noon, we begin dealing with our unconscious issues, and by afternoon we really have to find a new way of living.

Here’s how Jung describes it: “Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto.  But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning – for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”

Jung summarizes the “stages of life” as follows.  The first stage we are young and are a “problem for others.”  The second stage is a “going out, a time to embrace, fill up the beaker of life and empty it to the lees, keep nothing back, so that all that wants to catch fire would be consumed.”  The third stage, the second half of life has more to do with “expansion of life, usefulness, efficiency, the cutting of a figure in social life.”  Then finally in the fourth stage “unworried by our state of consciousness we again become a problem for others.”

But it is this transition from second to third stage that fascinates me.  “Ageing people should know that their lives are not mounting and unfolding, but that an inexorable inner process forces the contraction of life.  For a young person it is almost a sin – and certainly a danger – to be too much occupied with himself; but for the ageing person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself.

So what does this have to do with the spiritual path, you may ask?  Well, if you listen to Jung, Joseph Campbell or Bill Wilson, they all seem to link “God’s will” with taking care of ourselves.  But taking care of ourselves gets pretty murky and vague doesn’t it.  No one told me growing up that I’ve got 20 years to fill up the “beaker of life,” only to move into a different phase of some painful letting go followed by learning a new way to manage my insides.

And sometimes it’s scary.  For me, rising above fear was one my ego’s strong suits.  It could usher me into superhuman roles at times.  Without it, I’m forced to come up with new motivations like staying loyal to myself, rather than being the victor.  Consequently, I just feel like I’ve somehow got one hand tied behind my back.  I can’t use all the forces available to me anymore.  I don’t know if I’m half-baked or if someday this will all feel integrated.

I’d like to hear your comments.  As you get older, and make the transition from the morning to afternoon of life, what do you lose, what do you gain, does it feel integrated or like you’re working to overcome something and live in another space?

Son Volt’s great song about moving from stage 2-3.

Out Of The Picture

(Click on the song and a player will magically appear)

I have to confess a frequent case of feeling “stuck.”  Stuck for motivation, stuck as to understanding the trajectory of my life, stuck accepting life as it is in the moment.  I take full responsibility for the deal I made as a kid – namely that I would swallow the feelings that came up, trade them in as it were for what was behind door #2, a future where I would right all the wrongs and achieve victory over the things that plagued the adults around me.  I didn’t know I was doing it.  I was just trying to survive.  And the plan worked.  It saved me from harm and kept a roof over my head.  The problem, and it’s a big one, is if so much of the present as a child was mortgaged for some future “righting of the ship,” then the future carries a pressure to be something it is not – some sort of knight in shining armor.

Everybody’s reason for getting stuck varies, but no doubt it’s a universal theme and has been since the beginning of time.  Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote of how often it came up during his practice:

“For so called normal people, “I have no ready made life philosophy to hand out to them.  In the majority of my cases, the resources of consciousness have been exhausted; the ordinary expression for this situation is: “I am stuck.”  It is chiefly this fact that forces me to look for hidden possibilities.  I know only one thing:  that when to my conscious outlook there is no possible way of going ahead, and I am therefore “stuck,” my unconscious will react to the unbearable standstill.”

So apparently be of good cheer.  There is a force that sets us straight.  It’s our unconscious and we need only find ways to listen to it.

Personally it has rescued me from so many bone headed maneuvers that it has almost seemed like a direct line to God.  And if it is, it still surprises me that the unconscious is not mentioned more as a “healing agent” in religious circles.

Jung’s favorite way of tapping into the unconscious of his patients was to look at their dreams (to read about that in an earlier post click here).  But his real goal was to get people to develop a relationship with themselves to handle the pressure that comes with the second half of life.  As he put it, one no longer needs to educate his conscious will, but in order to understand the meaning of his individual life, he must learn to “experience his own inner being.”

Hmmm, experiencing the inner being, what would that look like?  I’ve had some luck with a few things:  walks with the dog, free flowing stream of consciousness journaling, setting the music player on shuffle, seeing what songs generate a strong feeling, and then 12 step meetings seem particularly set up for revealing the unconscious musings.  Of course it doesn’t hurt to shut down any addictive behavior.  Not that it’s always in my control, but a lot of compulsive habits can be shut down for a time.   That seems to help remove the clouds over the mythic paradise just long enough to hear the message and take some action to get unstuck.

I’m so done with the Station Fire!

It’s been a week now since the fires have been ravaging the hillside near our home.  It’s rocky and steep and there’s no way anyone can stop it.  We wake up mornings when the smoke is hanging over our house like a suffocating plastic bag and try to get out of town so we can breathe.  Then afternoons when the wind shifts we drive back home and  pretend we have a life.  Since the vegetation hasn’t burned in 50 years plus, our community hasn’t been through this before.  The police really don’t know what’s possible so we were woken up the other night at 3 AM and told there was a mandatory evacuation.  While we packed, the sheriff’s cars sat outside our house directing folks down the hill.  Finally at 4 AM when we were deciding what to do with our cat, the lights of the law disapeared.  It was quiet.  One of our neighbors walked by to say that his daughter was with the fire department and that the sheriffs had gotten it wrong.  The mandatory evacuation was supposed to be for homes up from us.

It’s been over 100 degrees every day.  Air conditioning has been blasting with an old unit that never gets the temperature down below 80 degrees.  Even with all the windows and doors closed, the smoke still gets in bad enough to make your eyes hurt.

It’s not any better now than when they tried to evacuate us Monday night in a sense.  The police are stationed two blocks down trying to keep everyone from coming in the area.  It’s not clear what we actually can and cannot do.  When they ask me why I’m going to my house, I just say to pick up a few things and leave.   But it’s clear they don’t want anyone around just in case the winds shift and the fire blows down off the mountain into the community.

It’s interesting to watch my own coping skills through the disaster.  It really reveals the role “normal” daily life plays in my sanity.  Without the anchor of job, school for the kids, goals to achieve, I’m lost.  I’ve been held hostage, glued to the TV screen hoping it would all “just go away.”  But it’s not, not for a long time.  To say the fire is “out of control” is like saying Dick Cheney has a problem with boundaries.  You can’t overstate the nature of the circumstances.

I have a window cleaning business to pay the bills.  Work shut down a week ago and was slow during August due to folks being gone for vacation, so I’m paying the bills with credit and bracing for the mountain of work coming up once this is all through.  It’s going to be unlike any year prior.  I’m pretty sure insurance companies pay for ash cleanup in mandatory evacuation areas.  I’m not sure there’s a better business to be in unless you’re selling mushrooms at a Grateful Dead concert.

What I’ve noticed though is you can only stay victimized so long before something inside says, “Enough!”  I can take stock in what I do have left, the long-term projects I’m working on, the time with the kids I wasn’t expecting.  I can use this as an exercise in going inward and finding solace there.  Exterior influences have long had too much of an influence in my life.  With no end in sight all I really can deal with is this day, this moment.  So here I am again, off to the wild blue yonder to find some fresh air and get the dog out.  Funny . . . I’ve never valued “air” so much.