   |
| |
|
by Tomás 
"Get a real life!" is a favorite retort by my youngest daughter and her peers to statements they judge to be hopelessly square. Despite its’ flippancy the point it makes is an important one. "Get a real life!" An unreal life, a pretend life with no soul or substance will just not do. A real life is what is called for and a real life, if we are to have it, must be struggled for, must be labored for, must be birthed. And just what is a real life? Is it measured by accomplishments? by goals attained? By the amount of money or material goods amassed? by one’s position, status, power? How many books you have written, papers published, conferences spoken at? initials after your name? No, I don’t believe so. I thing it has more to do with the individual's feeling of heart and soul involvement in the choices of their life with a sensed- purpose meaningful to their guts and being. Jacob Needleman, philosopher and author addresses this notion of a real life versus an "unreal" life in his differentiation of what he terms a "first-hand sense of identity" from that of a "second-hand sense of identity". The former is authentically ours while the latter is based on the values and dictates of others. How do we get a meaningful, real life? What appears to be helpful in creating it? One source of guidance to these questions comes from people facing life-threatening illness. Let's start with AIDS. In my work as a clinical consultant at the Center for Attitudinal Healing in Sausalito, CA. I helped facilitate a support group for people with AIDS for three years. Members of the group were recently diagnosed with the HIV virus or already dealing with its' effects on their lives, including seeing their loved ones and friends die weekly. Death was their regular companion. The diagnosis itself confronts them with the immediate reality that they do not have forever to live. The false sense of security-by-denial that most of us "live" by -- the " this could never happen to me, I'll live to be an old codger", fantasy is stripped away with great force. There is no place to hide. It's inescapable. They are forced by the reality of their situation to deal with the truth of death that applies to us all but from which most of us run until we too, forced by circumstances beyond our control, must finally face. Into group they came -- fearful, shocked, numb, angry, panicky, depressed, frozen. The feelings were acknowledged, expressed, shared. It cut to the core. The suffering, the pain, the loss, the devastation. With the precision a surgeon's knife we were opened to deeper levels of our being, and to an exploration of what was true beneath the layers of persona, personality, of socially dictated roles and values -- the "shoulds" of how and what to be, do and act. It became unavoidably clear to everyone in the room that now was the only time remaining between the present moment and death. This led to examination of how to spend it? What to do? What was important? What has meaning now under these conditions? It was quite amazing to witness how out of this pit of darkness so often emerged an actual birthing of their real selves, their real lives! As much as how they hated the disease, they also spoke of how it brought them into a quality of living that was not present for them prior to their diagnosis. Authenticity, compassion, courage, inspiration and acts of loving -kindness seemed to grow up out of the muck like lotus flowers from the mud, blossoming an enhanced life-quality that animated and enlivened the time of their days. They spoke of lives enriched by facing death, not denying and running away from it, but instead going straight into it, facing it and staying present to find out who they were and what was most important to them. It is an extraordinarily difficult confrontation but one that produced consistent results -- real lives of worth and quality. It's a damn-hard-way to get there though. I believe it behooves us to get to this place earlier on in our lives, not just near the end when we might not have much physical energy to act on it. I have a client in my private practice, a man in his fifties. A really nice guy. He's being eaten up by cancer. I've done some hypnosis work with him for pain control that seems to be helping. We're also doing some communication work between he and his wife and one of the interesting dynamics emerging from it is a new ability for him to say "no". This has been difficult for him to do in his life. As a result he has kept a great deal of feeling bottled up inside him for a long time. It eats away at him, sticks in his craw, his belly, and that's where his cancer is. But now, as he looks into the face of his death and sees the short end of the stick, he feels empowered to come out with his deeper feelings. He is no longer willing to keep his deeper feelings stuffed down in his entrails. Now he is saying "no" when that is what is true for him. And I notice that he gets lighter when he does it. He notices it too. He's regaining his self-respect which in turn helps him feel better about himself. He's coming to life with more energy and more vitality in the midst of his disease. I have seen a similar scenario repeatedly in my many years of clinical work with men, women and children facing life-threatening illness. Facing the inevitability of death, really facing it, with openness and receptivity while bearing fair witness to all that it brings up, can unlock a transformational power that births forth new life-- a more authentic living of real life. For many it is for the first time of doing this. It is very ironic but true, that the kick-start for birthing a real life comes out of the experience of facing personal mortality. There is something about letting go that can open us up to getting more... Physical birth itself requires a letting go in order that the birth continue on to completion. The relatively peaceful state of pregnancy and intrauterine life must be surrendered, a dying, if you will, of what has been. Birthing requires dying. You can't have one without the other. On the other end of the cycle, isn't physical death a surrendering, a releasing back into the universal energy dance from whence we came? Are we not dying from one state of being only to be "birthed back" into another, more expanded state? And isn't this basic process actually taking place literally right under our noses all the time? Watch your breathing for a few moments. The breath enters, moves through you and then leaves. Over and over and over again. All our lives. Just like the waves of the ocean. Each new breath in is literally a rebirth of life. For without it there will be no life. Yet notice how there is no room for this new breath, this new life, if we do not release the old breath. The old has to die for the new to be born. The dying takes us into the birthing. This basic cyclic truth of life is played out on whatever level one chooses to look. Soon it will be fall here in northern California and the leaves are already beginning to prepare for their demise. As the colder weather arrives the leaves will release from the branches and fall to the ground where the nutrients of their bodies will in turn nourish the earth. Then in the springtime new life will birth forth out of the bleak darkness of winter. In the resurrection story of Christianity, Christ is reborn only after his death, No death, no birth. No letting go of the old, no new. To the extent that we do not consciously face and acknowledge the role of death in our lives, and that it can come at any time -- to that extent we do not honor life. We put off, we postpone, we deny or run away from our deeper truths and why not , we can get to it later. Next week, next year, later, later, when the kids are grown up, when I retire, when I get the promotion. Only we may never get to it. Then should death come calling before we are ready, we are angry, we feel cheated, we bargain for more time so that we can start living our postponed lives! If only we could look earlier, if only we didn't have to wait for illness or old age to open the door to finding and honoring our authentic lives. But this is not so easily done. We may think about death at times , even obsess about it, talk about it, read the obits, but to turn our full attention to it and sit with it for awhile takes a lot of courage and is going against the grain of our cultural conditioning. It makes us feel uncomfortable and if there is anything our culture is about it is avoiding being uncomfortable. Look at the majority of adds on TV and in the magazines, look at the rising rates of drug abuse -- all connected with avoiding the experience of feeling uncomfortable for one reason or another. Because we do not want to deal with the uncomfortable feelings that come from really looking into the face of our own mortality, we don't do it. Thus we resign ourselves to dis-empowered lives lacking in quality, aliveness, joy and fulfillment. "Life is a banquet" said Auntie Mame in the famous play of years ago, yet many of us are starving. While it is tragically true that many are starving physically because of greed and unjust economic systems for the distribution of wealth in the world, many of the well - fed are also starving, but on a soul level, a heart level, a level that drugs and materialism do not address. Nourishment for the heart and soul comes only when we go into our depths of our being to listen within for what is true, authentic and real from the guts of our very essence. It is from that kind of listening that we can create real lives, ones that satisfy our innate quest for meaning and purpose.In closing this examination of getting a real life, I offer the wisdom counsel of the late folk singer Kate Wolf who sang: "Give
yourself to love |