There is a story about a beloved spiritual yogi in India who wandered for some time lost in God intoxicated states until he visited a hermit guru. The hermit guru, doing as hermits do, tried to chase away his visitor by throwing rocks at him. One of the rocks he threw hit the wandering yogi in the head. The impact and ensuing pain brought the yogi back from the bliss filled heaven realms.

Below is my story of how love hit me like a rock, broke my heart and brought me back to earth.

After spiritually awakening I had the need to understand, to mentally know it, to wrap my mind around it. I studied it, dwelled on it, and sought out other teacher’s views on it and over time, all the mental understanding and the conceptualization took on a life of its own. The mind became wrapped up with the remembrance of it, obscuring the actual experience of it. Before long, the heaviness and the thickness densely built up, only to crack and fall away to give way to clarity of being and fresh awakeness.

I find this experience to be much like the movement of the tides in the great oceans. Standing there I am Rick, the cosmic tide rises and soon there is no one there, only to reappear as myself again when the tide goes out.

The act of naming something becomes a distance between what “is” and the name we use. So how could awakening be talked about? Ah, and then there was the need to be politically correct when talking about awakening with others. Born from fear and the need to prove, I shied away from telling others about things that seemed outlandish or weird or just too personal.

Where am I now? I don’t truly know, yet I feel like I’m just a beginner.

For a couple of years after awakening I was so engulfed in blissful states that I was unable to fully mentally function. Concepts were very difficult to grasp as were questions about future or past. Driving, reading, writing and conversation were all challenging.

During this time I refused to use the words “I,” “me,” “mine” etc. To me, “I” was the most divisive word ever created. And yet over time I saw the utter hopelessness of communicating if I didn’t use words reflecting or indicating separate existence.

Friends and family didn’t know what to make of my different ways. The spiritual teachers I talked with were of little help in nurturing my need for connection, validation and reassurance. My deep insights seemed useless in a society fixated on the superficial. I became increasingly isolated.

A couple of years after awakening I reconnected with a woman who used to work for our magazine. She was on a path seeking to spiritually awaken and found my insights about awakening useful for her own growth. Some months after reconnecting we started a mentoring arrangement where we had regular contact for the purpose of supporting her spiritual path.

The mentoring was very helpful for me, it was grounding. I became more able to speak from the heart, mirror and articulate my experience of presence and communicate openly and non defendedly. I experienced both being nobody and also the experience of being Rick. The personal side felt appreciated and respected in the mentoring. Mentoring my friend was deeply healing for me and I benefited greatly by the work.

During this time of being valued by my friend, I found myself in somewhat of a contentious relationship with my wife. The bills were mounting and I was not bringing in an income. My search for employment never made it past the interview stage. My wife and I were still affectionate and loving but she had great anxiety and some gretchyness was growing about money. We also had some dis-connect as she didn’t know what to make of my experience of being a washed in ecstatic blissful states. Overtime, I increasingly looked forward to my mentoring sessions with my friend.

In an effort to bring in money I started a consulting company to work with large factorys to reduce their energy costs. The company took months to launch as the expanded states hampered my business and computer skills. Over time, I partnered with an engineer who had been doing this kind of work on his own but was having difficulty getting clients.

Sometimes, I don’t know why, I spontaneously drop into these energetic experiences where there is a felt sense of inner peace, joy, bliss and happiness. I “now” know from experience, that resisting energy just amps it up more. This is true whether the energy is fear, sadness, anger, or bliss.

Well, on our first presentation meeting together, at a large company near New York, I was really trying to be present in the meeting, resisting, the best I could, the flow of bliss energy. The more resistance, the deeper I found myself in this ecstatic energy, so much so that I could not understand a word anyone spoke. When someone asked me a question I could only smile and motion to my partner.

At times these energetic states have a contagious effect on others, pulling them into a felt sense of inner peace, joy and happiness. In the same way, anxiety, anger and sadness can be felt and influences those near by. Who knows, but after the meeting, the company representatives seemed very happy and satisfied. They signed a huge contract for our services.

Yet weeks after entering into the contract things soured with my partner. He became abusive and insulting to the client and some weeks later he became abusive to me. Some of our company bills had come due and I couldn’t get him to pay his part nor would he do any work. Shortly thereafter he dropped out of contact with me, no longer answering his phone or email.

Not long after, I received a referral to another company who was interested in my consulting services. This new client wanted me to visit their plant and do a presentation on our services. The company was only a thirty minute drive from where my mentoring friend lived.

I contacted my friend and she invited me to stay at her place during my business trip. The business trip went well and my friend and I enjoyed an easeful platonic connection—hiking, dining and meeting with a couple of spiritual teachers whose works I had published during the magazine years.

Some weeks after returning home from my business trip it became apparent that my mentoring friend and I shared a strong emotional and energetic connection, or chemistry. Long story short, overtime we fell in love.

This new love was complicated by the fact that we lived at great distance from each other and but the biggest complication of all was that I still loved my wife. Being in love with two women posed a huge quandary for me. I am very loyal by nature and was reluctant to leave my wife even though our relationship together seemed to be in a tail spin.

I have never been one for relationship drama or soap opera type stuff and I also had to face my long time strong judgments about these sort of things—yet I found myself in the thick of it, humbled by this mess.

The following months were heart wrenching, I wanted to be with both women but could only be with one. It felt as though there was a continual ripping open of my heart. I felt miserable, and had become defensive, numb and flat. I could not escape the pain of my heart. Like the spiritual teacher from India who got hit on the head with a rock, I felt brought back to earth. I still experienced the Samadhis' and the flow of bliss energy, yet I was suffering from human life issues.

Being in the mountains has always seemed to help me get clear so I proposed that my wife and I go to the mountains, to spend some time together. We had to plan the trip some weeks in advance so Mary could juggle her work load. As the departure day for the trip came around, things weren’t going so well. I had the feeling/intuition that we would not be coming home together. I didn’t know what to make of my intuition and resisted adding extra story to it. I did notice however that I was getting more withdrawn and flat.

On the trip to the mountains my wife had a spiritual awakening; I was joyful for her opening and for the loving connection that ensued. Yet I found that I still had love for my friend. After returning from the trip, communication with my friend became more difficult. To move on I felt I had to end the relationship and it was painful to do so. It had become apparent that I could not leave my wife and the continued contact with my friend became a raw reminder of love unfulfilled.

The resolution to end the relationship came by getting really still and feeling into my heart. Then the answer was obvious—I couldn’t leave my wife. Yet at the same time I felt devastation that I would not be with my woman friend.  In the agony, before feeling deeply into my heart, I internally weighed  the pros and cons of relationship with each. I found that I could convincingly argue either way—alas, intellect was of no use. I could only discern my truth from my heart, not my head. In the past, I mostly relied on reasoning to guide my life. In expansive bliss states, I was unable to mature in this way. I had to be hit on the head with a rock to crack my heart open.

After sometime, Mary and I started teaching meditation, spiritual inquiry classes and facilitating retreats together. I started teaching meditation and spiritual inquiry at a local men’s prison. Life moved on.

My father died unexpectedly last year and I became the primary support and care for my ailing mother. I also took over the management of a family business, the same business that I had started some twenty years earlier and signed over to my folks when I went into the publishing business.

My mother died seven months after my father; her final months were very painful for her. The pain from the cancer in her body was not quieted by the strongest of narcotic drugs. Tending to her during this time was very moving and heart touching.

Toward the end of my mother’s life I began overseeing my ninety three year old maternal grandmother’s affairs. She had been living at a retirement home and had just transferred over to the nursing facility. Within thirty days of my mother’s death my grandmother had rolled out of bed, broke her hip and soon died of complications.

Handling the deaths and affairs of three family members so close together was difficult and painful. A lot of old stories, both good and bad, along with the all the psychic entanglements a child feels for their parents, were put to rest. By the time I did the memorial service for my grandmother I found that I was getting skilled at memorial services—a skill that no family member in their right mind wants. Writing about the deaths of my family members, I am aware of sadness.  Although the feeling is poignant, I am grateful for being able to feel my heart.

For sometime after my folks and grandmother died I was swamped with handling their end of life issues, family affairs, estate and tax issues. An unexpected boon to my family member’s passing was some inherence that took care of old debts and left us with a more secure retirement future.


Life during this time

It all comes back, a simple breath and recognition. Ah… here I am again, right here, right now.

That’s how it’s been the last couple of years. Life’s drama takes me in, I’m intimately moved, danced or perhaps run over, and then I find the Mystery all opens back up to me like it was never gone.

It’s like diving in deep, swimming ever deeper and deeper until there is no sign of light, feeling the compression the denseness and then, just as I am believing my story, it all opens back up.

Is it consciousness circling back for itself or is consciousness just having fun losing itself only to find itself again?

The pull of the unconscious feels magnetic, ever pulling me into the dark thick places where I have not looked. Curious, I fall in again, not resisting, like sticking my own finger in my wound again and again, just to feel it.

As the unconscious pulls me in, I find again and again that it’s not refreshing or pleasurable, and yet, in a strange sort of way it is.

What joy and wonder to awaken again and again. So it’s not like the first time, but what the heck, it’s new none the less.