Free Refills

The profundity of change that I have experienced in my life over the past three-ish years did not come from my discovery of the quiet power of the breath on the Greatest Day, which first brought light into the darkness, nor of all the guidance Jerry gave me with respect to cultivating energy through centered, embodied awareness and the consciousness it develops. All of that was necessary, but it wasn’t sufficient.

The other crucial piece happened when I hit Bottom. That day, I looked at the shambles my life had become, felt the pain and anguish in my heart, and declared that I would change everything, literally everything, if that’s what it took to bring myself back to health.

I need to be very, very clear about this, because the universe took me at my word. It asked: Everything? You will truly let go of everything that blocks your flow?

I’d be lying if I said that I never hesitated. I hesitate still. The lives we live, no matter how attenuated, tend to give us a certain comfort. After all, we know it here. We know our way around.

But really think about it: if you are deeply unhappy, what do you gain by holding onto anything that doesn’t serve you? Are you not saying, in essence, “I choose to suffer?”

I’ve been talking about the Bottom without fully describing it. I wrote a piece about it a couple of years ago. You can find it here.

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For quite some time, I’ve been trying to fully articulate to myself why it is that I don’t regard the Greatest Day, as the day I came closest to suicide, as my Bottom. I’ve used the respective terms for quite some time, and they both feel totally right, but still, this seeming contradiction has struck me as kind of odd. Friday’s piece reawakened that feeling.

I was on the cushion for only about thirty seconds this morning before the answer came to me. On the Greatest Day, it was like I was in a deep pit during the blackest night I had ever experienced. Everything was dark. By following the breath, I found my way through the night, and eventually dawn broke, and far above me at the mouth of the hole I was in I could see light. Things weren’t as dark.

“I gotta find a way out of this hole,” I said. Then I looked around and grabbed the only tool that appeared to be available to me. I picked up my shovel and resumed digging.

The Bottom was the day I finally put the shovel down.

In last Friday’s piece, I said that it was by connecting with the breath that I was able to get through the Greatest Day. But I do not count the Greatest Day as the day from which the real changes in my life began. It wasn’t until early August, about nine months later, that I hit what I call my Bottom. (I steal the term from the 12-Step movement, while also alluding to this solid piece of advice: “When you find yourself stuck in a deep hole, first of all, STOP DIGGING.”)

On the Greatest Day, I chose not to die. But it wasn’t until the Bottom that I decided to truly live.

In last Thursday’s piece, I wrote this: “I’m still learning how to be happy. It turns out that happy as a baseline demands a different approach to life than what I lived previously.” On reflection, I feel a need to be a bit more careful with my words.

Happy is a tricky word. The way I used it, I implied that happy is something more consistent and sustainable than the normal rise-and-fall of emotions. But feelings are just feelings. When I think of Mango, which I do pretty much daily, I feel grief and sadness. When I scan the headlines in the NYTimes or WSJ, I usually feel some combination of anger and fear. When I think that my beloved Tottenham Hotspur play hated arch-rival Arsenal THIS COMING SATURDAY, WHEE, I feel excitement. All of these are just emotions. They arise when they’re appropriate. They pass away when they’re not.

What I’m really saying is that I live much more in flow now. Because of how flow drives one’s attention to the present, I’m much more likely now to notice the pleasure life offers moment by moment, and that leads, pretty directly, to feelings of happiness. But happiness remains an ephemeral emotion, just a feeling, no less transient than any other.

But I’m finding that there is a baseline emotional difference that comes from living in flow, and that it’s actually hard to put into words. I stumble around and end up saying something along the lines of “I’m happier now,” which, again, isn’t exactly wrong, but doesn’t capture the deeper truth.

After enough consideration, something occurred to me: it’s hard to put this difference into words in English because modern English developed in cultures that haven’t lived in flow for a long, long time.

(Seriously, he just about pissed himself.)

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HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT THEY GOT ALL FIVE SPICE GIRLS FOR A NEW ALBUM AND TV SPECIAL!? IT’S LIKE THE VERY UNIVERSE ITSELF IS SAYING THAT 2018 WILL BE VERY SPECIAL INDEED.

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!? THEY GOT GINGER AND POSH.

I FEEL A LITTLE BAD FOR OSTRICH SPICE, THOUGH. SHE NEVER FULLY FIT IN. BUT I KNOW SHE DID HER BEST.

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(Shout out to Dawn for making Ima’s day.)

None of the shirts have returned. Not so far, anyway.

Doubtless many of you are saying, “Hey, look, we get it, four years ago you dealt with a near-suicidal depression, and the universe helped you through, and, months later, when you hit bottom and really truly asked for help, you received all the help you could ever want and then some, and because of what you’ve learned from those experiences and since, all the changes you’ve made, how much better your life is now, and especially the intense gratitude you feel for all of this, you feel called to speak, because you believe that in so doing you can really help people. And that’s all great, but what we really want to hear about is more about your stalker.”

Hey, I get it. That sock showing back up … it really threw me for a loop. It was like finding proof of Bigfoot.

I tried on a couple of logical explanations. Like that maybe the sock had been static-clinged to the Famous Blue Hoody, and had fallen off at some point. But that didn’t really make sense–I’d pulled out the Famous Blue Hoody on Sunday, which would have meant that either I was carrying the sock around with me for a couple of days without me or anyone else noticing, or else, even less likely, it had fallen off right away and been sitting on the floor for several days. That certainly doesn’t seem very probable, does it? None of the other ostensibly logical explanations held up in the face of scrutiny, either.

So then what does that leave? The only thing left is that she brought it back.

I stared at the sock for a while. It lay there on the floor, both a question and an answer. Finally I said out loud, “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, for it is one of my very favorite pairs of socks, but could I have the shirts back as well?”

(Still referring to The Greatest Day I’ve Ever Known.)

When I read back over my one-year-later piece about the Greatest Day, I am struck by the series of coincidences that occurred to help me once I opened myself to the possibility of receiving that help. One way of looking at it is that they were just coincidences, and any greater significance I see in them exists only because of my narrative around the events–confirmation bias to the Nth degree. Certainly the scientific (or, more accurately, scientistic) world-view would argue that perspective, and maybe it’s true.

You’ll be unsurprised to hear that I don’t agree.

Without trying to be melodramatic, I’d say it took some strong intervention by the universe to get me through.

Through the path that I ultimately have found myself on, I have come to learn and appreciate just how little control over our lives we really have, and how much of what happens in our lives is just energy flowing (or not flowing) through us. We have choices that allow us to either allow it to flow or block its flow, but the natural state of all things is flow. From that perspective, it should be no surprise to us when we need help and find that the universe steps up to give us the help we need.

But I hear the scientistic reader objecting again: “This is still just confirmation bias. After all, a series of events happened to drive you down into that pit of despair. Where was the universe’s help then?” That’s actually a really good point. During the time that day when I sat in the chair in my office and watched my thoughts loop back on themselves and hurt like I had never hurt before, I was very, very aware that I had a very sharp knife in a nearby drawer. It wouldn’t have taken a whole lot more negative to transpire in my life that day before I would have decided to find out just how sharp that knife really was. So what changed?

The answer is here: “Somehow I got myself into the bathtub, and I lay unmoving in the hot water, and I watched my mind and I watched my breath and there I discovered that no single moment couldn’t be breathed through, so long as I could keep my attention close enough.”

The primary conscious activity we can engage in to help energy flow is conscious, centered breathing. I didn’t know this at the time. All I knew was that I needed to find a way to get through the next moment. The breath gave me that way. And from there, things began to improve.

Over the course of that night, again and again and again I was given help. I was desperate for help and I received help. Coincidence? Maybe. But maybe not. Ten months later I started working with Jerry, and the first thing he taught me was the centered breath. Within days, my life (still in a lot of turmoil at that time) started to improve. Within weeks, I was dealing with my life more skillfully, and learning to rewrite and re-understand the story I had told myself about myself for so many years. It wasn’t long before my depression lifted. Now I’m four years on, and I am a different person. Call it confirmation bias if you want. You’ll never convince me. On the Greatest Day, when I opened myself to the breath, good things began to happen. Later, when I became a student of the breath, my life changed irrevocably.

It really is this simple. (Though a bit of warning: don’t mistake simple for easy.) I so fully believe this to be true that I have devoted my life to sharing it.

Though I marked the occasion of the anniversary of the Greatest Day yesterday, energetically I connected with the experience most profoundly last Friday. The piano concert I mentioned in The Greatest Day I’ve Ever Known was a performance by the winner of the Van Cliburn competition that year. The Van Cliburn is a quadrennial competition, and this past Friday, this year’s winner performed at Macky Auditorium, just as the 2013 winner had. Between the contemplation of that not-so-distant day and being in a space that was physically and in some ways musically the same¹, I found myself overcome with strong emotions.

It wasn’t that I found myself reliving the depression, not by any stretch. Rather, I could recall the emotions of that day in a way that left me somewhat overwhelmed, and then to that I experienced the added emotion of the profound gratitude I feel at how far I’ve come. Consider: I went from the flat gray expanse of the anhedonic depression in which I lived for so many years prior to late 2013, then into the deep black pit I found myself in around the time of the Greatest Day (of which the Greatest Day was, obviously, the deepest, blackest part), and then into about eight months of turmoil, instability and anguish before I hit bottom in early August 2014–and from there I embraced life changes so significant that it’s only because of our sense of continuity of self-identity that I don’t simply say that I am literally a different person now.

Not that I don’t still have some connections to that four-years-ago me. I’m still learning how to be happy. It turns out that happy as a baseline demands a different approach to life than what I lived previously. Of course, it is a privilege and an honor to get to do that learning, and a still greater privilege to bear witness to the process, that I might help others who are going through what I went through.

Four short years have passed since the Greatest Day, but I live in a different world now.

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¹ The long-ago music major in me feels the need to clarify that this year’s winner was a very different musician from the winner in 2013. They are from different countries and cultures, with commensurately different relationships to the piano repertoire, and quite distinct in terms of technique and tone. Classical pianists are a far cry from fungible, young music-major Benjamin wants you to know.

What I’m saying here won’t make sense without first reading The Greatest Day I’ve Ever Known.

Today marks four years to the day since the Greatest Day. Without meaning to sound melodramatic, I am grateful for having survived. But (this might strike you as odd) I am also grateful for having experienced it. I believe I never would have gotten to where I am without having gone through that place. Pain like I experienced that day has a tendency to galvanize.

The vastness of the help the universe has given me, that day and since, humbles me still.