Our Dramas – The Emotional Self
Our dramas take place in our emotional body, that part of ourselves where emotions are expressed or suppressed. Whether we want to or not we all live out various dramas, get scooped up into them and indeed play many different roles. Our search is for Self Knowledge and it has taken us from the physical Self into the emotional Self.
A friend (Wayne who lives in a wheelchair) wrote an article which he entitled “I know it is your life but don’t take it personally.” If you fully understand that you can jump to the next chapter.
Hold it! Maybe wait till you have enjoyed the story I want to tell you. You enjoy stories don’t you?
Our dramas give us the chance to really show our acting skills and like good method actors we identify with the role. We do take our lives personally.
We could define our reality by saying,” our reality is what we attend to”. What we attend to is what we tend to experience, not so? If you don’t look at the flower you won’t see it. Our attention moreover tends to go to where our interests lie or where our compulsions are. Certainly most of us give the bulk of our attention to the details of our lives. When drama enters it grabs our attention exclusively.
I knew a couple that had been
going through relationship troubles. Both had been seeing therapists. Donald
had reached a point where a lot of what had been causing him sadness,
frustration, and thus a negative view of his relationship, seemed to have been
internally sorted out. On their wedding anniversary he booked a table for a
romantic dinner with wine, flowers and candles. They dressed up to celebrate.
He felt cheerful and buoyant. With the wine he toasted their life together and
told
I have a belief that most of us are born with a huge hole in our psyche. If we try to imagine the creation process, as mysterious and inexplicable as it is, we could say that the Unmanifested, Eternal, Undifferentiated All apparently gets expressed in form, time and space bound manifestation. Out of this Silent Non Moving Being a twist of form and action appears. Matter, linear time, action, cause and effect, and all the processes of life are thrust into existence. The Formless apparently takes on form. That is us, and the worlds we live in. At first, no doubt, initial forms feel a resonance, a harmony an essential contact with the All. The subtler their existence the nearer they are to their Mysterious Source. The denser creation becomes, the more concrete the form the more tenuous the essential contact with That. And thus we get to us, humans, mostly feeling no contact with All, indeed living and behaving with little harmony with almost anything.
We become separated from the All and it is a shocking experience. From being one with Existence we suddenly find ourselves seemingly on our own, and having to cope with conflict and threat. Inside we feel a lack though most could not define what it is. It is a lack. Something is missing. We are not at home. It is that gaping hole, seeming absence of Being, which we try to fill. Generally we try to fill it in an acquisitive way. The hole gets translated into a desire that gives us the attitude that if we fulfill this particular desire we will then be happy. We think our unhappiness is caused by this unfulfilled desire. It is, of course, a never-ending search because nothing can fill that hole but the Whole. You can observe the whole round of desires that people chase. The pursued desires never come close to filling that huge hole even, when, if you have good luck, you attain them. You work your way through various desires like a round of golf going from 1 to 18. When what someone else desires doesn’t grab you and you know that well and truly, then you can walk past those desires like walking through a shopping mall when there is nothing you want. Feeling free of the shopping frenzy (at Christmas for instance) you can observe the people, some frantic with desire and short on time rushing around trying to fill that hole, even with lists of how to do it. We are lost and desperately seeking happiness, fulfillment, triumphs.
When I see what some people run after I think,” maybe I am an alien!” It is like reading those tabloids in the supermarket while waiting for your turn at the cashier and you wonder how you have managed to live on the same planet with some people and not have recognized their existence. Do they come out of the ground when you go to sleep? Watch rush hour streams of workers. Do you see the brilliant light in their eyes of people living in the Eternal? Or do you see compulsive prisoners going from task to task? We won’t even get into the illegitimate ways of trying to fill that hole, drugs, alcohol and that sort of thing. It is enough to be bound to conventional imprisonment, job, family, mortgage payments, University fees for children, financial maintenance for separated families -“the whole tragedy” as Zorba the Greek called it.
All this ordinary life stuff never gives us the time to realize we have this hole, and even less time to do something about it. We become as much a prisoner as those just trying to survive. We do it just a bit more elegantly than the powerless and impoverished.
A few
years back I visited
those people must be a daily struggle just to get food in their bellies. If you had to decide what their attention was on you wouldn’t include beauty, poetry, grace and the leisure to ponder on their place in the scheme of things. The very things that make life tolerable for me must be completely absent.
I find it extraordinary that anyone would get excited by that sort of life. If your life is just a scramble to get a meager meal what on earth is there to get excited about? Why cling to it? To survive, merely to struggle through another day tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? And yet they do. Is there much difference between that and the same awesome struggle many endure to pay for the luxuries in a life? Both lives miss the mark. Both desire and seek everything but the one thing, Being, that would fill that hole. Both are on the same treadmill, pacing the same floor only with a different quality of carpet.
We live through what we focus on, what we attend to. Maturity comes when we know that this and this and this endless stream of baubles will never satisfy the hunger. So we ask the question: where does that hunger come from? If we don’t ask it we can’t answer it. For me the mature life is trying to answer that. What is the nature of fulfillment? How can I get it? How must I live my life for that to happen? How can I deal with my dramas in a way that allows me to enjoy my life? I hope you have already asked these questions. What answers have you found? Of course these will change as we grow.
Dramas
can be big or little. They can even be boring routine, the busyness of a daily
life that skirts around that huge hole day after day and says,” Not now but one
day I will seek to discover what ails me”. Like
I was fortunate. I was in my last
year at Stellenbosch university studying LLB after my B Com. My life suddenly
felt completely empty although I had been a seemingly happy go lucky sort of
boy, a sunny boy with a radiant smile. I took up yoga and read some metaphysics
and that was it. I decided the world was all baubles and I yearned for a
Himalayan cave. I finished my degree (Cum Laude for the LLB) and got involved
in a meditation organization. My first meditation course, in Hoch Gurgl (
If I look back at my youth it seems to me I relearned several life lessons very quickly. I did most of the expected things a young, vital, creative man would do. A few, minor excesses and I’d say “well that’s over with. I was done with that in a previous
Life.” There were other dramas to come, of course, because life doesn’t let one go until the lessons are thoroughly learned but the main direction and thrust of my life was set a 22 years of age. I wanted God and Enlightenment and I wanted to help the world to get these too.
I meet people who get into such drama they can’t see any light at all. You know those moments in a bath when you can’t find the soap and you swirl around with your hands trying to find and grab it, while it continuously slips away. Don’t swirl around. You only stir up the soapy water. Doing this, getting frustrated and swearing when you don’t succeed, is perpetuating your drama and getting stuck in it. Stand up, look down and you will see the soap so very easily and can gently pick it up. This is raising your perspective. Dramas, like sudden ill health, reduce your perspective. Meditation raises it. Perspective (and timing) as we will soon discuss is of major importance.
When
someone is in a drama my advice is save your breath until they are ready to
listen to you. When someone is having a nervous breakdown they are not open to
advice UNTIL they reach the rock bottom and are ready to come up. They will
often disagree and say you don’t understand or see it the way they do. Life is
so hard etc. Of course you can’t see it the way they do. From your perspective
(standing up in the bath) the soap is not lost at all. They are just failing to
see it clearly. Or else they will nod their heads and say, “Yes, you are right.
You are so wise” This makes you feel good which is why you probably gave the
advice to start with. But it won’t help them. They will immediately go back to
swirling the water and getting frantic about the lost soap endlessly escaping
their clutching grasps. Stuck in the drama.
Sometimes, as I have learned in teaching Tai Chi, students have to do the wrong thing long enough. There is nothing evil in doing something wrong. As we mentioned earlier, losing your balance is exactly the way to learn how to keep it. If people keep at the practice long enough they will learn the right way. In any event the “right” way is a progressive thing, for what is right today is most likely wrong further down the line. As a Tai Chi teacher you try to stop them hurting themselves. But even hurting yourself is a big lesson in how not to do it. And that is what some of our big dramas are, the hard way of learning. The school of hard knocks as they say. I read in Yogananda’s
“Autobiography of a Yogi” that some Buddhists say God has two arms which try to draw you in. One is the arm of happiness. If that doesn’t do the trick then the arm of pain will call you home. For mysterious reasons humans mainly go for the arm of pain. The arm of pain that will soon teach all humanity this so awfully clearly will be the environment and our health.
So people tend to get stuck in their dramas, even, amazingly, to repeat them all over again. I heard Rajneesh give a talk in which he said there is only one sin, which is to do something unconsciously. If you do something with awareness then, if it fails and causes you pain, you won’t do it again, unless of course you are an addict. In a sense we are all addicts in varying degrees and remain so until we finally learn.
A Sufi story I
heard Rajneesh tell.
A man was praying to God. “Why God do I have so many problems and so many troubles? Everyone seems to be happier than I. Why is this so?”
That night he had a dream. In this dream God called out in a loud voice. “Everyone wake up! Put all your troubles and problems in a sack and come to the mosque right away. I am going to get rid of them for you.”
People ran around catching all their troubles; some were right at hand; some they had recently forgotten about but were found lurking for just the right moment to be expressed. They had to thoroughly search for others. They found even those that were residues of childhood. They stuffed them all, complaining and whining in sacks. The dreamer was amazed to see how big some people’s sacks were compared to his. Some people whom he had thought were happy had huge sacks. Some people had to drag their sacks because of the weight. Some had little sacks they carried nonchalantly.
When they got to the mosque God said,” Put your sacks down against that wall and all of you sit down on the opposite side.”
They all did this. In the dark it was hard to see where their sack was now, piled up amongst all the sacks.
Then God spoke again.” Now all of you go to the opposite wall and take any sack you want. You can exchange your sack for another one.”
In the dark a miracle occurred. Everyone sought and found their own sack and took it back home with them. Even those who had brought huge sacks didn’t want to take a smaller one, for who knew what peril was inside? It might look small but what was a little problem for some people might be huge for them. And those big sacks, who knew what was stuffed in them? Better take your own sack back and live with it.
We do take our lives personally and seem determined to compulsively watch every detail of our film as it rolls. Because we are what we attend to, if this is all we do then these petty details ARE our lives. There is nothing else but these details. Often it is just a repetition of a previous episode. This is to limit ourselves to being small and avoiding All that we are and All that life can offer us. Continuously repeated experiences makes grooves in the consciousness, samskaras in yoga, and the energy will tend to repeatedly return to run in these grooves unless we do something about it. With the best intentions our mind will still slip into a groove and replay our scratchy tune. Moreover what is in our mind tends to attract similar energy to us. Groaners attract other groaners and compare notes or compete in misery. I remember a lady who never ceased to complain or tell sad stories. Someone falls pregnant and she would recount graphic descriptions of all the things that can go wrong with pregnancies. If some couple told her
they had decided to delay pregnancy for a few years; she knew and, would tell them in sorry detail, of people who did delay then couldn’t get pregnant.
One day in her kitchen I saw an old photo of people enjoying a picnic. They all looked so happy. I felt this was a safe subject and pointed to the photo. She then told me exactly how every one of them had died! This one was rushed to the hospital and when a surgeon cut them open a burst spleen disgorged muck etc. Every single happy face in that photo disappeared into the drama of their death. The happiness was sucked out of that photo. Their faces crumbled and shrank into skulls. In such gloomy company there were no safe subjects!
Eric Berne (Founder of Transactional Analysis, popularized in his book “Games people play”) gave a list of certain roles people assume and how they seek out people who will play with them, sometimes to their great suffering and misery. Sort of like how a masochist will find a sadist. “WHAM (why does this always happen to me?) will find NIGYSOB (Now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch). WHAM goes through life being unfairly treated and NIGYSOB goes through enforcing his full measure of pain. “Elke pot vind sy deksel”. Every pot finds its lid as they say in Afrikaans.
Partly this is a gift from life. If you want to play a certain role, life will give you that opportunity over and over again until you decide “enough!” I learned that from my early days with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (between 1962 –1977) observing that he would often push people. He had one typist, Nina, typing 20 hours a day on a 1962 meditation course. He scolded one young man who hadn’t done a task,” Don’t tell me you have to sleep.” What I learned was this, that a great spiritual lesson lies in being able to say the word, “No.” A “No” loud and clear, not necessarily in anger but just stating you didn’t want to do something. It is a wonderful lesson to learn and better sooner than later.
So many of our troubles are like holding a big, heavy ball that is causing us grief. It could be an addictive habit such as going too many extra miles, making a martyr out of ourselves, or smoking, any behavior pattern that causes suffering. We do all sorts of therapies and obsessively discuss our problem with friends but the ball (the problem) stays tightly held in our hand causing suffering. One day we just drop it. The ball falls automatically and we think, “Wasn’t that easy?” Now, as long as you don’t pick it up again that ball (the bad habit) is out of your life and your drama. As we saw earlier when you have done something wrong long enough you are ready to learn something new.
How long is long enough? as long as it takes for you to decide “Enough” or “No”.
I have observed that in a theatre when the play is theatre of the absurd it is generally not long before the audience accepts the parameters of the absurd as the reality of the play. Whatever the absurdity the audience will accept that is the-way-it-is. I have watched my son Raphael play a video game and get extraordinarily tense in certain situations as he tries to battle some demon. I have told him “If it makes you tense stop the game.” But of course the “fun” is in the tension. Stop the game and you are out of the situation and can start to relax. We all see that. We all see that when we observe other people’s dramas. It is very easy to have perspective when it is they who are searching their soap! But when it us, our drama, when we are in our bathtub with lost soap, our perspective and wisdom are the other side of a shut door.
How then to gain perspective? First of all try when you are not in the midst of a drama. In the midst of a drama is the hardest time to do this. Just as a regime for good health is best begun while you are still healthy, seeking serenity and balance is a good task for when you are feeling good.
Laws seem to repeat themselves on all levels of life. Think of and prepare for winter even though it is summer.
When I
first visited the
Meditation is an excellent way to gain another perspective. There is a part of our selves, our soul and our spirit that transcends the details of our human life. This can embrace you during meditation.
I teach a simple technique in my School of Tai Chi & Esoteric Arts. Take off your shoes and kneel sitting on the ankles. Some people who have tight ankles can’t sit like this. You can use a zazen bench that elevates the buttocks a bit and puts less pressure on the knees or ankle or you can sit in a chair. I like the floor because it is easy for me. Also sitting like this helps open up the joint of the ankle. All joints are energy spots and a yogi once said that this position helps open up the third eye. All the same this exercise can’t be done if you are in discomfort. If you want to practice sitting like this to open it up do so while listening to music or watching TV to alleviate the sense of discomfort. For meditation use a chair or a stool or a cushion to get comfortable for this practice.
Close your eyes and take a full breath. A full breath consists in filling first the belly, then the mid-lungs and only then the top of the chest. Most people breath with only the top of the lungs, pushing out the chest. A few others breathe only from the belly. We have to learn to take a full complete breath. With each full breath you do two locks, one in the throat by pulling your chin back and one down below by pulling your anus up. Shoulders should be relaxed and to aid this I allow my arms to hang loose. Focus on the third eye. Start to exhale slowly through the mouth feeling the air leave first the chest, then the mid-lungs and then emptying from the belly. At this point start to slowly bend forward which will force more air out of your belly. Time it so the air is all gone by the time your forehead touches the floor, if you are kneeling on the floor. Hold this position without air for a little while (there should be no strain) and then start breathing, through the nose, by first filling the belly and then as you rise up, mid-lungs and chest. At the top again make sure your shoulders are relaxed, not hunched up, and you do the two locks (chin and anus). Keep your focus on the third eye. Hold the breath for a little while (no strain) and then start exhaling and repeat this procedure for 10 to 15 minutes. As you get into a pleasant and easy rhythm pay attention to the bending forward. Feel that as your head sinks down it as if you are sinking into the earth. The earth is the origin of our bodies. It is our material Mother. So sinking down into it is like going home. Going home is a pleasant, relaxing experience. You can let go. Give up all that you hold on to. Surrender. Allow that sinking, letting go feeling to be all. Feel how empty your mind can get. For just this moment let go of all who you think you are. Let go of all your drama. Allow a nothingness to invade your awareness. Allow yourself to become this nothingness. No struggles, no goals. Just for this moment give it all up. No dramas. Sinking down into nothing, darkness, the silence between thoughts. The Silence that fills your Being, the Nothing that is transcendent to things. Surrender to this. As you rise up allow this peace to stay. At the top even with your focus on the third eye notice how sometimes you can feel the energy of the air in your chest, the brightness of it, coming from the heart, feel how the third eye pulses with light. It will help to have the tip of your tongue gently pushed against the hard palate and your teeth, not clenched, but slightly apart.
I have done a few meditations on the last breath of Jesus. Imagine what it must have been like; all that turmoil, shouting crowds, suffering and rejection, the sadness and the confusion of friends. And now that last out-breath as He merges with God. With that out-breath the total letting go of what is a temporary situation and the surrender into an eternal bliss. Similarly for all of us, no matter what our lives have been, our dramas, here with this last out breath we are letting go of all of it. It is a relief and a joy as we expand out of the temporary, leave the theatre of the absurd, to merge into the All. That huge sack of problems we have toted on our backs drops away, our out-breath takes on a feeling of relief, restriction is replaced by expansion, we can’t help but let go into deliciousness So let go and surrender. This is the feeling you want during this practice of breathing. The head rolls down in time with the squeezing out of that last out-breath and as the forehead touches the floor the surrender is complete. For this moment there is nothing and that nothingness is a miraculous Fullness.
There is another way to look at it. We are breathed in and out by God, by Life, by the All. There is that natural expansion and contraction like a heartbeat, effort and rest, to all life. Just as in Tai Chi we stretch and then relax, rise up and then sink down. A natural rhythm. As we breathe in we breathe in Life or we can say Life breathes INTO us. God breathes INTO us. We get filled by Universal Energy. We breathe in what God is exhaling. We receive what God gives. Then when it is our rhythm of exhaling the opposite occurs. What we breathe Out God receives. We give it back to God. So our lives, our existences are drawn back into God. Out of that vast Pool, energy has come into our lungs, and, now, with the exhalation back into that vast Pool our individual energy returns to It. As we are sucked back into the Eternal we surrender to that feeling, we get reabsorbed, our individuality drops away. Just so is that out-breath in this exercise. We are reabsorbed by the All (the Tao). In that re-absorption we let go our dramas. For that brief moment as the forehead touches the carpet the dramas aren’t there. For that brief moment the soap is not lost, the pain of the loss, the unfilled hole in us, is not there. For this one moment let go. Allow yourself to savor it, to be soaked in that experience. Feel how that peace remains as your lungs fill, and, as you rise up, you rise back into the world; you are reborn to individuality. You may even feel the joy and the love of being again recreated and breathed back by the All into individual existence. You may feel Light filling your chest and, love expanding from the heart centre, Light pulsing in the third eye.
For many, except during deep sleep, this is the first time they let the dramas go and moreover, it is, unlike in deep sleep, a conscious letting go. Like many of the arts I teach in my School, it is a practice that is accumulative. It is a process each time of going a little deeper. As you gain the new perspective of your life it is like having a part of it that is beyond drama. Having lost the soap is not the only experience you can have. You have touched That which is beyond drama. This is the goal of meditation. You are beginning to learn how to re-find your balance when life topples you.
This is an excellent practice to precede meditation. I often follow it with the Tibetan exercise for raising energy and an ego reducing kriya using the breath of fire breathing. These three can create a hum in the body, like the sound of being near a big electric transformer. The body resonates with the energy and where the tongue touches the top hard palate you can feel how the energy pulses as it circulates through two main meridians. One meridian comes from the perineum up the spine, over the head and to the top palate. The next goes down the front of the body back to the perineum. The tongue, touching the hard palate, acts like a link between the two. Thus when you have the energy flowing strongly you can feel it in the tongue, a current that gives a particular tingle to the tongue’s tip.
We
have talked of the two pulses of life, activity and rest. We could also talk of
birth and death. Death permits change. When something gets stopped it can feel
like a death but, often, that death is so that life can change and move on in
another way, a destruction of the old to permit change. When life wants you to
move in a certain direction and you resist that the push life will eventually
give you what feels like intense discomfort, pain. So many of
us resist change till that painful, insistent push comes.
Some
years ago a gifted clairvoyant Marilyn Rossner came to
If I had nothing authentic and original to say why waste paper and take up space in bookshops?
I had
begun to feel cramped in the Tai Chi organization and felt restricted not being
able to share with my students all that I knew, all that I had discovered and
which, because of rigid rules, I was not permitted to
teach. But I wasn’t ready to leave it. I enjoyed teaching my little daytime class,
liked the people who came and felt loyal to the organization. I had been a
member of it for 24 years, indeed had been the founding member of the club in
Because of my intense summer gardening, an activity which fills 3 freezers, a large root cellar and keeps us mainly vegetarians in food all year I had been unable to go to the summer week, held annually which was designed to keep us informed on teaching matters etc. They seemed essentially so basic .The only one I had attended was very boring. Moreover because of financial constraint I now baulked at being forced to make the obligatory $500 tax-deductible donation (on top of the fee) to attend when I had no income to deduct it from any way.
Each year I wrote my apologies at not attending. After four years my apology was no longer accepted. The local committee informed that I was going to be disciplined and be asked to stop teaching my class. I went through considerable turmoil exacerbated by the fact that over the previous 18 months my investments had plummeted to near zero and this was, naturally, very worrying. I kept trying to hold on to my niche in the club, a niche that each year had got smaller. After 6 years as President of the club, 21 years as an instructor and all that I had done for it I thought an exception would be made for me.
What I am recounting are all the exterior things. The truth is that life wanted me to do something else but I was being dim and not seeing this. I was sitting in my bath and couldn’t find the soap, busy with my drama. I kept going over all the exterior stuff and kept trying to cling on. 24 years involved participation is a lot to let go of! The more I clung the bigger push that was given, the more intense my turmoil. The one thing I could not do was say, ”Yes, I will do exactly as I am told to do.“ I wanted my place on my own terms and that is exactly what I would never get. The structure in the organization didn’t permit that, and, of course, in their view one small exception might endanger their whole structure!
I was doing Tai Chi outside my home and asking myself, “ What does life want from me that all these troubles have descended on me?” The answer came instantly, “start your own school.” I had never considered doing this but I knew immediately that it was correct. In that very instant that I let go of clinging to what I wanted, and embraced what life wanted of me, all turmoil left me. It was a perfect lesson in Taoism. Don’t cling.
There is a story that Lao Tzu was sitting under a tree and he watched a leaf falling. As it fell it turned and spiraled and moved exactly as the breeze pushed it. It did nothing that wasn’t inspired by the breeze and never refused to do as the breeze encouraged. Lao Tzu saw the wisdom of this and discovered the principle of Wu Wei, non resistance. In the resisting of the urging of life is pain. In the following of its promptings is peace.
So I decided to start my own School and call it The School of Tai Chi & Esoteric Arts. I immediately went to write down a curriculum. The next day was my morning class and I emailed the Instruction Board that I intended to resign my membership at the end of my class so that this would spare them, my friends, having to tell me to quit. At the end of my class I told the students that this had been my last one and I told them of my intentions for a new school. Of course I also cried. One door shuts another opens!
In thinking of what I could teach, I realized that much of what I could offer were my own discoveries. They were experiences I had had as a result of my own searching and understandings. I realized that they were an authentic voice, not just recycled book learning. I discovered I had something to say so I decided to write a book. This is it.
It is a book of finding and of letting go. Of trying hard, showing grit and determination but also of allowing change to happen. Working on structure but being alert to the flow.
What would have happened if I had followed the promptings 5 years earlier of Marilyn Rossner and my own cramped feelings in the club? If I had quit then before the push? Would have I lost all that money? Wasn’t it strange to see that financial necessity was needed to prod me into activity? That I could be as obtuse as the next man about my next step. That I could avoid change as determinedly as anyone else. Moreover, that I would have to question my structures of loyalty before I could take that next step and teach on my own and in my own name.
“Structures of loyalty.“ Belief structures. This takes us on to the next chapter.