Love, Rage & Pilgrimage
At the tail end of September 2022, my dad embarked on a profound pilgrimage. Following a lifetime of spiritual wandering, he walked through the gates of the Gomde monastery in the French Pyrenees to begin his three year, three month, three day Buddhist retreat under the guidance of Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche. This is an incredible voyage to undertake as a young renunciate, let alone in your late seventies, and it is a powerful reflection of my dad's dedication to find and embody Truth.
It has also brought a mix of powerful teachings into my life. On the one hand it has forced me to sit in the fire of old abandonment wounds: to fully inquire into the felt sense of loss in my body and unravel unconscious beliefs that I somehow do not matter or am unlovable. These mental and somatic 'programs' are carried over from childhood, learnt in the fray of a sometimes tumultuous family of origin, and paradoxically taken on as survival mechanisms that kept me emotionally shielded, safe and small.
Dad's departure has also forced me to examine the architecture of repressed anger towards him. As a child it did not feel safe for me to voice such power and so I buried it, battening it down with a mix of unconscious mental commands and somatic contractions that kept it in the dark. When dad initially told me he was going to do a retreat, the initial flurry of emotions gave way to a kind of numbness. Using Kiloby inquiry tools I leaned into this, asking the body whether I could freely get angry at dad. A strong 'no' in the body pointed to repression and using specific Kiloby tools, I have begun the work of reaccessing this anger in a healthy way, giving voice to the hurt of the inner child.
This work is profoundly important because repressed anger holds a part of our vitality, power, and wholeness. Left buried, it is often somatised, boiling over into chronic pain and other body symptoms. And it is medicine in an era of spiritual bypassing (the push to 'transcend' our suffering or 'negative emotions' through transcendental practises such as meditation) and the cult of the happiness trap ("don't worry, be happy").
Many other feelings have emerged since dad entered retreat, but inquiry into both the abandonment wound and repressed anger highlight the bigger picture of my own life long search for Truth. The truth of who I am, at my core, beyond all labels, concepts and received ideas. A truth that is multi-layered, not just soul-centric or spiritual - the preserve of the divine - but also psychological and somatic. Rooted in flesh and blood reality. Liberated by the dissolution of cognitive repression programs, patterns of somatic contraction and the healing of old trauma.
For me, healthy spirituality encompasses all four realms of being human: soul, spirit, soma and psyche. And it includes all aspects of the human experience, no matter how dark or shameful, holding that each represents a doorway into a deeper truth. Arnold Mindell, the founder of process oriented psychotherapy, describes this metabolic approach to healing as rainbow medicine: a recognition that all phenomena are ultimately born of a non-dual pilot wave that animates and gives substance to the entire universe. That in stepping through the doorway of even the most challenging experiences, we can access a deeper truth that has its rooted in the sacred. This is embodied spirituality: the sacrament of flesh and blood; the communion of joy, love, rage and grief and the altar of this living, breathing, beautiful body that sometimes suffers.
Dad, I wish you well on your voyage and hope we meet again. May you be happy and know the causes of happiness. May you find the truth that is your birth right. Borrowing from the liturgy we once recited together at the Awakened Heart Sangha in North Wales: May the heart's awareness awaken in the unawakened, where it has begun to stir, may it never fade, and may it awaken fully.
I love you.