Sadness scares me. Grief, the experience of grief and grieving, scares me. But I also know that grieving, that being with grief and sadness, is one of the most powerful and effective ways of being with and transforming pain. When I let my grief and my sadness speak, when I allow those energies to stir in my belly and my chest, to move up through my heart and my throat, to enter the world as tears and moans and sobbing and wailing, I am cleansed. I am lifted. I can see again. I feel real again. Human.

But entering that process is challenging for me. It’s tricky. Sensitive. I almost have to be taken by surprise. Like so many men, I’ve been conditioned not to feel such things (not directly anyway) and certainly not to express them, not even privately. The messages are clear: “Be a real man. Take charge. Control yourself. Don’t cry. Be tough. Don’t be a wimp.” If you are a man who is suffering, keep it to yourself. If you have to feel something, feel angry. Anger is manly and therefore safe to feel. Grief and sadness are not.

Grief work is hard for many of us as men, and so much has to be learned (and unlearned) in order to do it. You have to be tough and soft at the same time, and you have to be present with what you’re feeling without losing yourself in the intensity of it. It’s not easy. Healing is not for wimps. The real tough guys are the ones who can do the work …

You can read the full article at:

http://goodmenproject.com/guy-talk/healing-is-not-for-wimps

A couple of months ago, I was real sick for about a week with some sort of horrible cold/flu/whatever. After a few days, I began to realize that being sick as a dog, while not pleasant, was giving me a much-needed opportunity to slow down so I could remember and relearn how to be with myself again. And that aspect of being sick, once the realization kicked in for me, was sweet. A big part of that sweetness was remembering and re-experiencing what it was like to be with my body, moment to moment, without any agenda or any schedule. I’d had a similar experience in the last few months of 2009 when I was in the acute stages of dealing with my broken wrist and shoulder, but the nature of that experience was different. It was extreme. What I rediscovered while I was sick for a week was more of an everyday mode, the mundane “being with myself” that is needed for common experiences, like a bad cold. Or a bad day.

I’m having a lot of bad days lately, and I’ve been struggling to come up with a good way to deal with that issue. While driving to the pizza place recently one night after work (pizza and a brownie being my most favored self-medication and after-work sedative for the past few years), I was thinking about what else I could do to numb the painful after effects of these meaningless, seemingly endless, unrelentingly dreadful days at work. And I realized almost immediately that no amount of pizza or sex or TV or porn or drinking or drugs or overeating, nothing I’ve ever done in the past or could ever do in the future to try to numb myself and escape, would make that awful pain I feel at the end of every wasted day go away, because what I’m feeling is the pain of another lost day in my unlived life.

That was, and is, a sobering realization, one that has left me with a problem that is not easy to solve and a question that is not easy to answer:

How do I live with my pain?

I know I’m not alone in wrestling with this issue. I know that a lot of folks feel stuck in lives they didn’t see coming. They begin each day filled with dread and end each day filled with regret. They want to change their circumstances, but can’t, for all kinds of reasons. When I was younger, I used to tell others, “If you don’t like your life, change it.” I believed that, and I lived by it. I’m not saying I don’t believe it now, but I can also see now that life isn’t always so simple, or the path to change so direct. Sometimes life just piles up on people and boxes them in, sometimes as a result of their own choices, sometimes as a result of the system and the times in which they live, and sometimes as a result of chance, or fate, or karma, or whatever term you prefer for the mysterious and often apparently random hand of cosmic force in our lives.

I am where I am in my life as a result of all of the factors and influences listed above. I feel trapped in a losing game, and every instinct I have tells me to free myself and run for the life I want. But the way to freedom remains unclear, and the gap between my inner vision and my material reality is the distance between the life I want and the life I seem able to have. So I string my meaningless workdays together like a set of bad pearls and hope I can use them to buy myself some time somewhere down the road. Good strategy going forward, perhaps, but it does almost nothing in the now to diminish the pain of losing another day, and another, and another …

The Sufi poet Rumi wrote, “The cure for pain is in the pain.” My experience tells me that this is true. I also know that embedded within every painful time and experience in my life has been the seed of great transformation and healing, not just of circumstances, but of self. And yet I resist. I want no more pain. I want to be done with it.

Sadness scares me. Grief, the experience of grief and grieving, scares me. I’ve written about this in the past (“falling through”). But I also know that grieving, that being with grief and sadness, is one of the most powerful and effective ways of being with and transforming pain. When I let my grief and my sadness speak, when I allow those energies to stir in my belly and my chest, to move up through my heart and my throat, to enter the world as tears and moans and sobbing and wailing, I am cleansed. I am lifted. I can see again. I feel real again. Human.

But entering that process is challenging for me. It’s tricky. Sensitive. I almost have to be taken by surprise. Like so many men, I’ve been conditioned not to feel such things (not directly anyway) and certainly not to express them, not even privately. The messages are clear: “Be a real man. Take charge. Control yourself. Don’t cry. Be tough. Don’t be a wimp.” If you are a man who is suffering, keep it to yourself. If you have to feel something, feel angry. Anger is manly and therefore safe to feel. Grief and sadness are not.

Grief work is hard for many of us as men, and so much has to be learned (and unlearned) in order to do it. You have to be tough and soft at the same time, and you have to be present with what you’re feeling without losing yourself in the intensity of it. It’s not easy. Healing is not for wimps. The real tough guys are the ones who can do the work, and if you don’t do your work when you’re called to do it, something bigger will come along and crack you wide open. None of us is immune to these processes.

I know, I can feel, that there is a lake of grief dammed up inside me now about the life I haven’t lived, and that I won’t be living tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day. It frightens me, but I hope I can find a way to let it begin to move through me soon, because that’s the best way I know to be with, and live with, my pain.

but our little house of lies isn’t big enough to hold us now
she won’t stand up for herself + I can’t stand up
for both of us at the same time anymore
so we ride the broken lover’s seesaw of staying + leaving
one foot in + one foot out
we dance in the kitchen like unloved children + wait
for fulfillment of old pain’s expectations.

so anxious to leave
so anxious to be left
so anxious to be right
so anxious to be hurt
so anxious to be disappointed
so anxious to be alone again.

when this whole thing started
I wanted us to be immersed in each other
I wanted us to fix each other
I thought that was what people were supposed to do
I don’t want that anymore
I don’t need that anymore
but I still don’t know
how to love someone I don’t want to fix.

(PDF version | Video version)

no second thoughts
he takes her straight in
straight into his veins
straight into his bones
a double shot of morphine
right between the eyes
the visions come
fairy tale poison
she can save me.

no more pain
he lives again
no more doubt
he is strong again
no more fear
he is free again.

for now.

(PDF version)

what’s the half-life of a lousy childhood?
stranglehold tentacles
come out of a house where
nobody I know lives anymore
body and soul clench like a fist
when that hairy hand tries to pull me down
I need lights
I need noise
I need naked female flesh all around
else I implode.

how do I give up what I don’t understand?
this home isn’t broken it’s blown to hell.

now here’s a place where I can be unhappy in peace
totally safe and unbelievable
a crime against everything I was brought up to be
a slap in the face to that guy who thinks
he knows how it’s supposed to be done
a tight connection to all those old friends
I thought I’d left behind
whores just like me
who knows what they sell themselves for?

last chance for ro-mance
take care of these ladies and they’ll take care of you
why do I need this?

the weird thing is I don’t even see
most of these women anymore
not even as objects.

can’t buy a thrill?
sometimes I can sometimes I can’t but
I don’t need a thrill
I need a break.

(PDF version | Video version)

he had a lot of leg cramps at night
he called that a goddam charley horse
I used to wake up with intense pain in my leg
the leg I broke
trying to catch up with him
when I was first learning to walk.

sometimes we’d both wake up at the same time
on the same night
I liked this because I got to spend some quiet time
alone with him.

I never wanted to go back to bed on those nights
we’d sit in the living room or the kitchen
in the dark or with a dim light on
he seemed more open in those moments
I didn’t feel like he hated me then
maybe it was because he was sleepy
or in pain.

those were special occasions for me
nothing to accomplish or be judged on
we each had our own pain
similar but not the same
he was empathetic
I felt connected to him.

in those brief moments
I always felt that I was just like him
just like I always wanted to be.

(PDF version | Video version)

I’m a spiritual child who grows up
being told + shown that
god is just a sunday morning pain in the ass
waiting for me to screw up
so he can rip my life to shreds.

I’m a passionate child who grows up
being told + shown that
feelings are unacceptable + dangerous
to myself + others.

I’m a creative child who grows up
being told + shown that
adults don’t have time to be creative.

I’m an honest child who grows up
being told + shown that
I’m always supposed to tell the truth but
it’s usually safer + more acceptable to lie.

I’m an independent child who grows up
being told + shown that
going my own way leads to rejection + disaster.

I’m an intuitive child who grows up
being told + shown that
I need a logical justification for
everything I do say + feel.

I’m a smiling child who grows up
being told + shown that
laughter is the best medicine but
happy people usually get punished somehow.

I’m an energetic child who grows up
being told + shown that
I’m not doing enough because I’m lazy.

I’m a gifted child who grows up
being told + shown that
my contributions aren’t very important in this world.

I’m a curious child who grows up
being told + shown that
self-awareness endangers the family
so I’d better not question things too much.

I’m a patient child who grows up
being told + shown that
there’s not enough time
I’m going too slow
everyone’s tired of waiting for me.

I’m a bright child who grows up
being told + shown that
the brain is where it’s at but
people who make a living with their brains
are lazy bastards.

I’m a trusting child who grows up
being told + shown that
I don’t deserve to be trusted + trust
opens the door to abuse.

I’m a hopeful child who grows up
being told + shown that
life is a series of unhappy events + disasters
so don’t expect too much.

I’m an innocent child who grows up
being told + shown that
I’m a bad boy + I oughta be ashamed of myself.

I’m an open-hearted child who grows up
being told + shown that
I’ll never be good enough
I’ll never be loved enough
I’ll never be man enough.

I’m a sad frightened
lonely needy
raging hurting child.

(PDF version)

spirituality is a vibrant awakening consciousness
a deep and present awareness of ourselves
of everyone and everything around us
it’s knowing that our words and our actions matter
even when no one hears and no one sees
it’s listening to the heart and the mind and the body
to moon stars sun and trees
to wind fire rain and earth
to animals and plants
to dreams and daydreams
to grief and anger and hunger and sex
to all of the feelings we’ve been told not to have
and all of the thoughts we’ve been taught not to think
in the right balance
in the right time.

spirituality demands critical thinking
it requires curiosity
a desire to know what’s real
a willingness to strip off conditioned patterns of perception and habit and belief
layer by layer
regardless of personal cost
because otherwise
truth and truthfulness are lost.

spirituality is facing the mysteries of life and death
without hiding from questions that cannot be answered
and without the comfort of tall tales passed down through a million dark nights
it’s knowing that we are not alone
because we’re all here together
and it’s all up to us
together.

(PDF version)