Deep Root Investigating (and The Practices)

As soon as I get any kind of idea of changing myself – with change basically meaning self-improvement (only phrased in a way I find more palatable), I get loaded down with negative feelings and a certain kind of focus that, believe me, does not help me change. The same is true of goals. If I get determined to accomplish something, I’m in trouble. All I do is think about it more.

Just ask my husband and kids how I act, and even worse, how I look when I get determined. I am told, “You should see your face.”

Being as I know this about myself, I lit on the idea – prevalent in AH Almaas’ Diamond Heart Series, Buddhist thought, and even Centering Prayer in a more roundabout way – of investigating what arises. If I find myself with a concern that’s weighing on me, or a feeling that seems to reach back and push buttons with memories from another time, I stay with it and investigate…but very loosely. I don’t declare myself to be investigating; I just stay with it.

I can’t say that this makes me feel good, but I will say that it brings insight, and the insight feels good. If I feel like I’m getting at the truth of the matter, I know that’s what I need. I’m seeing what I’m really dealing with.

So here’s the drill: I feel uneasy in some way…sometimes due to a particular circumstance, and sometimes for reasons that are very vague but still insistent. I investigate. You could say I feel worse, but I’m going deeply into the feeling as if pulled. I don’t feel crabby about what I’m feeling and I’m not berating myself for it, because it came up of its own and, the benefit I get for staying with it is it pulls me down where it needs to take me. I might feel all kinds of feelings – sad, or lonely, or humiliated, but I’m definitely interested. It’s like the feeling has roots and stories attached to it and what started out as a feeling caused by a spat with my husband sends me back to feelings that I had about my dad and some long buried pain that gets released for being looked at. It’s rarely an instant healing but it lets me see where the pattern originated and what it’s really about. Without seeing the origin of the pain, it is like treating the symptoms without finding the cause, and you might feel better, but only for a while, and only as long as you lean on the treatment.

I’d call this deep root investigating brutal but gentle and still, I prefer it to the self-improvement style of change.

A self-improvement idea would look like this in me: I’m going to once and for all figure out what I do wrong with men so that I never again feel this icky feeling, and so that I always keep my sense of self at the forefront. Something like that.

I’d start out crabby and remain crabby. Crabby, determined, hard, cold, already feeling wrong, and in my head. What might come out of it is new rules: I’m going to do this or that and if things don’t improve the consequences will be this or that. (My thoughts go to that sterile place often enough even without ideas of self-improvement – or maybe you could say with ideas of “others-improvement.”)

So you might ask why I’m writing of practices, and I’ll tell you the truth – I’m doing it because I’m still feeling the division between seeing the truth and living from it. I turned to these practices with the hopes that they can help me. I’m sharing them because maybe they can help you too.

The practices of A Course of Love are about coming to know the unknown, and so, right off the bat, they don’t have that disadvantage of coming at me like a self-improvement dictum. We all have our ways and this is probably the only way that might have a chance of working for me. (Our favorite spiritual messages are our favorites for a reason! They fit us!)

A Course of Love is all about wholeheartedness and I’ve been practicing wholeheartedness for over ten years. All that was said about it is in me, rattling around, messages sending me signs and clues and reminding me of who I am. The practices in the treatises are about the beliefs of this course and they’re there to lead us beyond belief to knowing. I don’t have a doubt about these basic descriptors of what it’s all about. But if I’m not living by what I know, then maybe there’s a disconnect somewhere, and this is what I turned to these practices to find.

Even as I say this, though, I want to add that I think it’s the rare person who is not working through things, basically, for a lifetime. It’s part of the beauty and challenge of being human and I truly wish spiritual texts didn’t make it sound so easy.

I believe what they’re saying is that once your motivation has moved from fear to love, you’ve done the hard part, and that’s the part that can happen really fast – even before you’ve realized it. In fact, realizing it – making real what it means to live from love instead of fear, is the basis of the rest of the course work – which is basically defined in ACOL as a life curriculum. (I would add, as a curriculum for our whole, entire lives!)

It goes something like this: Return to love. Then work out the details.

(Some of those pesky details, i.e. life practices, forthcoming.)