Conditions were perfect. No wind. Small, mellow, friendly waves with lots of time in between to rest. Not a struggle to get outside. Swell coming from one predictable direction. Water was COLD -- until we got going and then it was fine. Our favorite surf instructors and all the girls around for a Saturday morning class. A fine day. I got up on the board MANY times. Never for long, but something shifted in my brain that allowed me more time to process. I wasn't catching a wave, hanging on for dear life, and hoping something happened. I was moving toward my pop up swiftly, getting up immediately, and deciding what to do. I had time, mentally, to make decisions. Everything worked. Surf sister Reihna dubbed it my "epic day."
It was almost six months exactly since I took the first class, so I wonder if my brain just took that long to accommodate this new type of movement. Rightly or wrongly, I also think of surfing as a mirror of my mental state, and my epic day fell a couple of days after an epic day in therapy. So, I wasn't surprised that I could surf better. It just fit: a physical manifestation of my emotional world. Progress was made on both fronts. Still nowhere near skillful -- still very much consciously incompetent -- but massive progress.
It was one of those therapy sessions in which the therapist says just the right thing at just the right moment that unlocks something big. I heard the words and realized in my body that I have always been safe. I have spent a lot of time armoring up, protecting my heart, anticipating disappointment (with people and experiences) so failing to truly enjoy the moment, any moment. In the session, I felt a release; I felt lighter. In the days after, my heart was sore in the way that muscles, once relaxed, are sore after clenching them for too long.
If enlightenment means the falling away of illusions to reveal a truer view of reality, I took a step toward that this week. I was lighter in body and mind. Lighter as less weight and lighter as in brighter. Richard Rohr is one of my favorite writers and thinkers around Christianity. In his book The Universal Christ he says, "Remember, light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else." In the company of this amazing group of women, somewhere between the deep blue of the ocean and the bright blue of the sky, I could see. I had time to see.
If this were a dating site, I'd say I'm spiritual but not religious. I read a lot about religion and spirituality, because all faith traditions point to a greater truth. Not being tied to any one of them, I think I may in time develop a clearer picture of that truth because I can look freely at them all. It is not surprising that I have taken to surfing, because underlying surfing is a deeper set of values. I have yet to meet a surfer that doesn't feel that being on the ocean is a sacred space, even if they don't use those words. The water can be flat as a pancake, but there are tens of people in the line up, enjoying the peaceful rocking of the waves and the community of like-minded people. The horizon is our altar. The seagulls sing the choir. If we are lucky, the ocean provides a sermon that we all can hear, delivered on the tides, the glistening fins of a dolphin, or the long heavy beak of a pelican gliding by.
I am mostly a fan of Carl Jung -- dream analysis, collective unconscious, archetypes, symbolism -- analytical psychology as the road to enlightenment. Bodies of water in general symbolize the psyche and emotions; in dream analysis, water is your emotional state, your unconscious mind. Water is also a symbol of rebirth, fertility, baptism, renewal. So surfing and enlightenment, religion, spirituality -- whatever you'd like to call it -- are parallel symbolic paths, and for me, this moment in time is seeing a convergence of several forces nudging me to find a new path forward.
My therapist is the sage I have sought to guide me for this part of the path; he specializes in attachment issues and is also a Buddhist, so working to process adult versions of childhood trauma with mindfulness and equanimity is particularly fruitful alongside the mindfulness meditation teacher training course. Conditions are perfect for breakthroughs. Very gentle. Not about struggle but about awareness and staying with something to feel its edges, knowing I can abide the waves, feeling safe in the darkness, in the essential groundlessness of life.
One of my favorite Buddhist writers is Pema Chodron. In her book, The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness, she writes, "If we see our so-called limitations with clarity, precision, gentleness, goodheartedness, and kindness and, having seen them fully, then let go, open further, we begin to find that our world is more vast and more refreshing and fascinating than we had realized before. In other words, the key to feeling more whole and less shut off and shut down is to be able to see clearly who we are and what we’re doing." In the company of this gentle sage, I am learning to see. I have time to see.
This weekend is the anniversary of a first epic day. A day 20 years ago when I opened my eyes from a deep sleep after Thanksgiving dinner and told my husband I was done with this marriage, an act so uncharacteristic of my former self that I remain in awe of it. Talks (arguments) had been ongoing for months, but that was the day I decided. The actual moment one of us walked out the door. When I talked that last time, it was logistics, not negotiations. Now, I can look back with new sight and know I was not so much divorcing a man, but my former way of being in the world. I divorced that self, malformed from accommodating other people to the neglect of my true nature. And I went on to discover a new self under the rubble of my former life that has walked a winding path to now. Dusting off. Confessing. Uncovering. Every step in therapy revealing a truer vision of me, my essential self.
And like back then, now is again about uncovering a reality that has been buried in muck. (Will the layers of muck ever end?) The pearl beyond price has always been there; I just needed to keep digging. I'm looking back today with so much appreciation for the bravery of the woman I was. I couldn't see then that a 55 year old surfer chick was pulling her forward. (I wonder who pulls me forward now?) All I knew then was I couldn't continue being that person and doing what I was doing. Things had to change. It was very dark for a very long time. Maybe that's the essence of faith -- a willingness to walk in the dark for a long time until you reach something real.
Anne Lamott is one of my favorite authors and I have borrowed her faith and the faith of other authors to light my way. At the beginning of Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, she writes, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear. When I look back at some of these early resting places ... I can see how flimsy and indirect a path they made. Yet each step brought me closer to the verdant pad of faith on which I somehow stay afloat today."
Being a Jungian has been a big part of my faith. Insight. Synchronicity. Believing in something larger than myself without really following any particular religion has gotten me through. Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey has been a mystical map. I like the Buddhists, because they have a great sense of humor and concrete practices that I can do to get me through the swamps of doubt and fear. My lily pads have been great therapists. I have had a great therapist in every city in which I have lived -- so lucky. After the initial, years-long stint, I now enter into therapy for short bursts of time when I need help to get over or get through something. This time, I felt a lot of STUFF happening inside of me and needed some help figuring out what it was. Like my brain processing movement on a surfboard, definitely staggering, my heart needed some help breaking through some old stuff. I'm making massive progress. Uncovering a light that's always been there. Baptism into new realities.
The verdant pad I rest on today is my surfboard, surrounded by fierce, real women. They feel genuine to me, like I'm meeting their real selves. Jessica Dore wrote today about an evolving understanding of loyalty in friendships. She wrote, "I've been wounded before by an understanding of loyal that says we should want the same things. I think now that loyalty, like love, thrives in difference. Loyalty -- and friendship for that matter -- seem less about doing what someone else wants you to do and more about understanding what writer Zadie Smith has said, that 'other people are as real as you are.'" She reminds me of the root of the meaning of the word religion: "religare, to bind together." (Think -lig- like ligament, something that holds things together.)
Many things strike me about this missive. First and foremost, how so many of our wounds are self-inflicted, brought about by an imperfect understanding of what another has tried to tell you, partly because you don't have enough information and partly because the message has been muddled. As children, the adults around us, coping with their own wounds, reflect our inner lives imperfectly, not at all, or worse. We have to continually live in and grow through these distortions and misperceptions, layers and layers of muck, until, for some of us, our true selves are twisted and buried beyond any recognition. Finding ourselves again is archeological labor.
Secondly, I am more ready to find relationships with people as real as me. My ability to see is different now. Saltwater is healing my wounds. Therapy is removing veils of confusion. I am enormously grateful for the group of women who have gathered to accompany me on my way forward. Like the Nereids, sea goddesses of power and light, coming to the aid of poor sailors in distress, I am supported. My path is no longer dark but light-filled, sunny, and though we are surfing in cold water, filled with warmth. We bind ourselves together in this sacred space, our differences a source of joy, our common enthusiasm carries us forward through the waves. Conditions are perfect.
Anne Lamott wrote an opinion piece the other day in WaPo. In it, she writes about the value of not knowing, about accepting people for who they are, about moving forward in the dark, and "No matter how low you are, the light can always reach you." I trust the light now. I have always been safe. The light reached me 20 years ago as a sliver and now, I need SPF 50 and zinc to protect me from it. I can see, more and more clearly every day. The world isn't safer now, but I am safer. My brain has had time to process; I have time to decide. Not struggling, but releasing. Equanimity, peacefulness, gratitude. Surfing on top of the ocean's darkness, I can see just fine. Pretty epic.
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