Free Refills

You might recall that around the recent equinox, I promised that I would read all the Refills published thus far, as well as all the zero drafts behind those published pieces. Over the past couple of days, I started that process: I went back to the very beginning of the project and read all of season one. What I found there was remarkably cohesive. Most of what I wrote over the first couple of months was about process. I explored what the publishing practice felt like, talked about the zero-drafting technique behind the finished pieces, and connected the writing to the greater context of the energy work that had by that point already made such a huge difference in my life. In the third month, I wrote a lot about what I was experiencing on the Great Road Trip of 2015, while connecting those experiences with some writing about my friend Nolus, the two-year anniversary of whose death occurred during that time, and whose ghost I found traveling with me during parts of the trip.

You might also recall that I recently declared that, while the flow in my life is increasing at what feels like an exponential rate, I’ve felt that my work has been basically stagnant. I’ve been asking myself, “What is the block there?”

All the way back in the earliest days of Free Refills, I asserted that I was building something with the writing, but I never really had a firm grasp of what that might be. As time went on, I felt decreasing confidence that I’d built much besides the pieces themselves. However, the cohesion I saw in those earliest pieces suggests that I’m closer to understanding what I’ve built with my writing here than I ever realized.

Welcome, flow. I invite you in.

Here we go.

On Friday, I asked what I could offer to help us break out of our spiritual poverty and move toward abundance. Later that night, my answer came to me. There are two simple things I can and should do.

The first is to continue to bear witness to my experiences on this path. Some people won’t want to hear what I have to say–but some people will. For them, I should continue to speak.

The second is even more direct. I remembered just how easy the first step on the path can be. If you give me an hour of your time, I can teach you enough that, with a little practice, you can start to experience energy flow yourself. That’s really all it takes for you to find your way to the door.

Yesterday, I asserted that the mainstream worldview is deeply impoverished compared with what I’ve been calling the through-the-door worldview. I also said that the only way to truly see the difference is by going through the door. While I pretty much can’t shut up about my experience, I’m not eager to proselytize, and I note that in our world, trust and faith are at something of a premium. So then I wonder: Is there anything else I can offer to help us break out of our poverty and move toward abundance?

All week long in my drafting, I’ve been trying to come up with the right adjective to describe the difference between my pre-through-the-door worldview and the shift that happened very early in my work with Jerry. In my zero drafts, I kept coming back to the word truncated, which isn’t terrible, in that it articulates a lack, but isn’t very good either, in that it’s not the right metaphor at all, truncate being an active verb denoting shortening by cutting off, which implies an awareness of that which is cut off, which awareness is the core inaccuracy. Meaning there’s no awareness. You can’t see what’s actually there, in large part because you don’t believe in the thing that’s there to be seen. If there’s a word for inability to see what’s there because of a lack of belief in the thing to be seen, I haven’t figured it out. Anyway, regarding the descriptive difference in worldviews, yesterday I got to stinginess, which is better, but today I found my way to impoverished, and that has a proper denotation: lacking to the point of poverty.

What I also like about it is that it’s not an exaggeration: the difference between the through-the-door worldview and the mainstream, there-is-no-door-what-are-you-even-talking-about worldview is not the difference between having and not-having, it is the difference between abundance and utter penury. The difference is literally that dramatic. Go through the door and you’ll see.

But make sure you follow what I’m saying to its full implication. The there-is-no-door worldview is, by a vast, vast margin, the dominant worldview operating in the world today. How much do you think the suffering that surrounds us all the time has to do with that worldview?

(Hint: Pretty much all of it.)

On Monday, when I spoke of the decision to go through the door, I said, “What other choice did I have?” We all recognize “What other choice did I have?” as a figure of speech; you don’t need me to explain it to you.

But I was thinking about it earlier today, and realized that I was being a little flip with my words. If you are thinking of walking this path, understand that your previous understanding of “choice” is something you might as well throw in the garbage.

And as energy begins to flow, you will witness that the universe will put things in motion as it deems them necessary. You’ll need help with something, and the day you articulate the need is the day you meet the person who can help. You’ll ask for a specific opportunity and right away the opportunity will arrive. If you’re at all like me, you’ll be a little freaked out by how readily synchronicity arrives, and you might try to defend the stinginess of you previous world view by using words like “coincidence.” But “coincidence” is a coward’s word. The universe is moving you because it has decided to. Your “choice” in the matter is either to acknowledge that you don’t really have a choice and just go with the flow–or else fight it, and fuck it up.

Look, I totally understand: choice two is the less frightening choice. It’s always easier to stay stuck. But do I really need to articulate that it’s better to surrender to the flow than fight the current?

Just to be clear, there’s a whole lot on the other side of the door. When you walk through, the journey has just begin. From where I stand now, my passage through the door a few years past, I’m pretty sure the journey never ends.

It is a gift that I get to serve as testament that change–big, radical change–remains possible well into our lives. My own first step through the door happened a few months after my fortieth birthday, and the path of change in the years since has been sometimes exhilarating, often frightening, and consistently challenging. It wasn’t long before it developed a momentum all its own–it seems that once you sufficiently commit to the path, there’s no stepping off it.

On my good days, it’s all a shit-ton of fun, this adventure toward a better life. Yes, I have to wrestle every day with habits that go all the way back to childhood, and habits that old get deeply embedded in the body and don’t let go easily, having served us in their way for a long, long time. I bring consciousness to trying to change, and then something happens and I fall right back into my patterns. Okay, then, I’ll try again. I bring consciousness to trying to change, and then something else happens and I fall right back into my patterns. It’s kind of like a dance with my past self. For a long time, he led the dance. Now I do.

I promise you, if I can do it, everyone can do it.

I lived with blocks for so long, and carried the weight of the despair the blocks engendered, a deadweight that first crushed out joy and its myriad colors, leaving only a flat gray numbness, and then under that relentless pressure, the numbness crystallized into the blackness of annihilating depression, almost uncuttably hard, an anti-diamond in the heart of the soul.

For years I tried to figure my way out of the problem using my big ol’ brain, not understanding–indeed, incapable of understanding–that a major part of the problem was the big brain itself. You’ll never solve the problem of lack of feeling by thinking about it.

For years, I struggled. Then, one day, a generous teacher showed me the door to feeling. It was like: HOLY SHIT, THERE’S A DOOR.

Once the door was open, it was pretty easy to walk through. I mean, what other choice did I have?

In recent weeks I have watched with joy and pleasure and wonder as the flow in my life has expanded and expanded and expanded. But I’ve seen little change in the flow around and within my daily work.

I’m seeing growth throughout my life, except in the area of my work. Surely that is indicative of a block, yes?

Yet I believe myself to be poised on the cusp of change there, too, a change as devoutly desired and as necessary as any in my life.

So then, what can I actively do to most effectively bring about that change?

The expansion in my life doesn’t feel like something I have created, per se. I mean, I continue my practices–I center, I meditate, I cultivate energy and flow consciously through my body whenever I think of it. But what I am receiving now in return seems like far more than I have put in. The other day I wrote, “Take one step toward the universe and the universe will take one million toward you.” That’s a nice turn of phrase, easy to say, but when I really confront it and accept that it appears to be true, I find that it opens up a whole lot of questions about who we really are and what our role during our time on this planet is really supposed to be. Big questions. The biggest.

When I look closely, it feels like the main action I have done to cultivate this expansion is to welcome it. To delight in its presence, to tell it, “Come on in,” that it is always welcome here. As I’ve gotten to know it, I invite its presence more and more.

The major stuckness in my life is in respect to my work. I haven’t much seen an opening there, even as everything else has opened. I want that opening. I’m ready for it, even as I acknowledge that, because I have been blocked there for so long, it is likely to be a hell of a ride when the opening starts.

Okay, then. I’m ready. I’ll strap in.

Welcome, flow. I invite you in.

Here we go.

I have been writing since maybe the summer solstice of 2015 about the benefits that would accrue to my work here if only I would get off the treadmill of having to finish each day’s piece on the day I’m publishing it. I’ve written about it and written about it … but I’ve never really done anything about it.

When we declare that we’re going to change, but we do not change, it’s worth asking ourselves, What is the payoff for staying where I am? Because clearly I am actually choosing that payoff over changing.

In recent weeks I have been watching the flow in my life expand and expand and expand. Obviously I have made space for that expansion. But in my writing, I am doing the same thing I’ve been doing since I started the Free Refills project. I wonder: Why am I not making space for expansion in that area? And what would it look like if I did?

If the story I told yesterday was a description of what happens when life is lived in deep flow–and it was; the magic of that weekend did not begin with the coincidence of discovering Bishop Briggs performing in Portland the next night–then surely it requests we ask the question, “What else could we create in our lives if only we opened ourselves to that flow?”