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.”

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)

Photo: Andrew Kitchen

I have to confess a defensiveness toward all upbeat pithy spiritual admonitions. Like, “In this moment, you have everything you need.” Or “You are right where you’re supposed to be.” I mention this because these are probably the two concepts I need to grasp most, but for whatever reason find myself fighting.

“In this moment you have everything you need”

My first argument to this is, “Well maybe I do and maybe I don’t. Who are you to tell me?” It doesn’t look like I have everything I need. As a matter of fact it looks like just the opposite. It looks like there’s gaping holes in the boat and unless they get patched pretty soon, the ship’s goin’ down.

After catching my breath and thinking about it though, the pithy ones may have a point. What I actually need to get through this time is probably more available than I think. So the problem must lie with my expectations of what I’m supposed to have in this moment.

I wonder why?

About 3 months ago, I injured my shoulder lifting a ladder. It proceeded to get worse so I saw a doctor and eventually signed up for physical therapy. After a month of it, another month has been prescribed. But halfway into the process, I’m not so sure I’ll get the full recovery I was looking for. All of a sudden fear grips my body, much like the sound of a mac truck slamming on its brakes 5 feet away. Not only will I lose my ability to make a living with my shoulder, I’ll lose my recreation (golf) that provides my sanity! Quick, what should I do? Panic!

But then there’s a good day in physical therapy and things look a little better.

So the spiritual question is, why all the panic? Why do I go there so easily? As a kid, there were no spiritual answers, only ego choices. My personal choice was to wait out all the abandonment and injustice as a kid, knowing that one day, I would take what was rightfully mine. I would go out and conquer the world and right all the wrongs that were done to me.

But of course if you do grow up (which not everyone does), you come to find out that adulthood is more about letting go and contributing where you can than any sort of playing field where you even up the score. Problem is I’m hard wired to even up the score and get something, which then facilitates the scenario for panic to set in.

The beauty of the way God set up the universe in my opinion, is that things happen to let you know, “You can’t go on living like this.” An injury, divorce, sickness, job loss . . . often they’re not coincidences, but stop signs telling us to go in another direction, one that’s truer, that serves us more fully. My shoulder injury definitely forces me to look at my thoughts of invincibility and illusions of getting what I want in my time. Now I’m forced to let go a little more. (as a caveat to this, I’m not sure why nothing happened to Dick Cheney to stop him . . . or maybe it did and his will is strong enough to temporarily push through it . . . either way I’m going to have a talk with God about this discrepancy when I die.)

So I’m guessing the best way to look at these pithy spiritual sayings is as a barometer. I don’t necessarily have to buy them lock stock and barrel. I can meditate on them and when resistance appears, I can look at that and maybe see the blocks inside that are keeping me from peace and sanity.

I leave you with one last admonition, but I don’t recommend meditating on it.

Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.

I found myself a couple weeks ago nearly getting into two fights on the golf course. Now if you knew me, I’m about as pacifist as they come and if anyone were to raise a fist, I would most certainly run the other way. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to stand up for myself when I feel I’m wronged. And I can get pretty heated about it. Much like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, who was unable to turn down a challenge where somebody called him, “chicken,” if someone yells at me for something that wasn’t my fault, . . . well . . . it’s on! Fortunately for me no fists were thrown, although there were prolific uses of the F word on one day and my friends pulling me away on another.

I made a mental note of my losing control and started the spiritual work of asking what it was about? I was right! (. . . that much I knew.) I was definitely in the right . . . and when you are right you should defend being right to the end, no letting anybody walk over you or impose their crap on you . . . right? It’s a matter of principle.

But then I heard some guy on the radio over the weekend as I was flipping channels . . . he sounded a bit New Agey for my taste, but he hit me dead on when he said, “If anybody says something that causes you to overreact or get defensive, it’s because there is a kernel of truth in what they’re saying that resonates with you on some level. It may be something that you don’t want to admit, but it’s not them that’s the enemy, it’s a piece of truth about yourself that you don’t want to embrace.”

I learned early on in therapy that my two default reactions to preserve my sick ego are anger and hero pursuit. Mostly in childhood, I stuffed my anger, but as an adult, anger became a tremendously effective if not limited tool in my arsenal to combat an unjust world. The secret emotion that I never wanted to feel was hurt. I never wanted to be weak. It may be the emotion I was legitimately feeling at the time, but I had no place for it. We Witzemans buck up and move on. As Monty Python’s medieval knight says after getting his arm chopped off, “It’s only a flesh wound.” But “hurt” is probably the most honest and healthy emotion to feel because it keeps things from escalating and centers me in a way that puts me back on the spiritual path.

So now because there are no coincidences and God has created a synchronistic universe, of course I would get another test a week later. I was playing the tricky 8^th hole at Brookside Golf Course in Pasadena and managed to hit two balls into the water. The first in the lake fronting the green and the second in the man made cement water runoff to the left of the green. Seeing as how I could retrieve the second, when I got to the green I walked down the cement embankment and scooped my ball out of the water. No sooner had I done this, did I hear, “Don’t be pickin up somebody else’s ball, that’s not your ball, what are you doin pickin up somebody else’s ball.” It was Hunter, the homeless guy chewing on a rib bone sitting on a crate. (He has found a home where money actually rolls down the water to his front door, where he industriously bags the money in the form of golf balls and sells them for a fraction of what it would cost new.) “No,” I doth protested, “I earned this one, I hit it in myself.” “No you didn’t,” Hunter’s voice began rising, “You took somebody else’s ball. There are a lot of golfers here that are a LOT better than you and when they hit their ball in the water, they just let it go and they LEARN from their mistakes. Let that ball go down the river, and you won’t make that mistake again!!! You don’t know sh#t and you certainly don’t know how to play golf!!!”

I felt the heat and the tension move up through my chest and into the front of my face and I was all ready to let him have it . . . when the radio guy came into my head and some old training from Alanon taught me the simple response, “You may be right,” and “I guess that’s one way of looking at it.” Now mind you, that wasn’t what I wanted to say, but I did out of some quest for sanity. The events of the previous week had rented too much time in my head to do that again. I guess, you can either be right or you can be sane, it’s your choice and I was hoping for sanity.

I’m no saint. As I walked away and he kept going on and on about what a terrible golfer and philosophical weakling I was, I decided if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I started a rant of my own. “When I had my first lesson ever, I can remember the wondrous things that that teacher did tell me and I said why couldn’t I see that before and he showed me how to hold the club and then how to turn as if in a phone booth and . . .

He looked at me with that look that says, “Oh my God, this guys crazier than I am,” and got real quiet.

So besides a little sanity, now I had some peace and quiet as I walked to the next tee.

A rather blurry view of Hunter and his home.