Blog 7, part 2
"The Toughest One I've Had To Write Yet"
“In the moment of Surrender, of vision over visibility… It’s not if I believe in Love, it’s if Love believes in me.” – Bono/lines from”Moment Of Surrender” as performed by U2 from their album “No Line On The Horizon”
Alright, I’ll confess… this specific entry has been the most challenging for me to write. For many reasons.
First, if you haven't read part 1 yet, scroll down and read that first and then come back to this. Thanks.
This one, I put it off as long as I could stomach, even blowing a self imposed deadline from last week in the process.
Before I get into it, lemme say that new on the menu at the Euphoria Loves Rawvolution café on main st in Santa Monica, for all the fellow "pasta/noodle/spaghetti lovers" who are now gluten free (and yes, in my own mind I'm #1 in that fan club), is a Pad Thai made from delicious Kelp “noodles” that will knock your sox off! Also, and I don’t know for how long, is real and fresh Mangosteen fruit that I’m told is very rare and hard to come by. The taste is amazing and I invite you to pick some up before it’s gone.
Now, back to the journey…
June for me has been very, shall we say “eventful”. And what I’m really trying to say is it’s been the hardest month for me since I began my journey of giving up meat, fish, and dairy in my shift to a full time plant based plan of eating (and primarily ‘living food’).
Sure, there have been lots of external activity this month, however, much of the “events” that have happened, occurred inside my mind, soul and spirit. I’ve began to Howl. Euphoria sometimes doesn’t feel too “Euphoric”.
Or as the great meditation teacher Jack Kornfield put it, “After The Ecstasy, The Laundry”.... Exhale. Life on the path of transformation. The realness of beginning to “wake up” after such a long slumber is that there is more and more of the total life “experience”, which is both “agony” and “ecstasy”.
So many moments arise throughout my day where I feel so completely alive and certain only to transition to the next wave which is the darkness of doubt, where I appear to experience a world where the questions come to mind like “are you f’n serious??? Do you really think you can pull this off”?
I’m just beginner at learning to surf the waves.
I haven’t lived at a weight of under 200 lbs since I was 17 years old. So much of the past 20 years has been spent between 250 and nearly 350 lbs (with a year period where I temporarily dipped down to 205 lbs, not allowing myself to physically and emotionally breakthrough that number “200”. I'm only now at the start of the discovery of "why"). As of this writing, I plan on being at least 199 lbs by time of my 37th birthday on October 9th of this year. A LOT is happening between now and then. A great part of me is absolutely freaked out! So much now is being uncovered as I walk the path of realignment. And sometimes, it appears that I’m just not sure of anything.
There is a fantasy I have where I just so badly want to stop the entire world and “fix myself”… go through this entire metamorphosis, and then re-join the world without having missed a step.
This moment, this year.. literally feels like the first year that I’ve actually been alive. It’s so so strange. There are moments where I feel so connected and in tune… many others when I appear to feel totally isolated and lost. What’s actually true and what is illusion? The dream is filled with exquisite paradoxes.
I think it was about a month ago, where I was reminded of just how fantastical my fantasy was, when one of the things I would most absolutely not want to happen this year, happened. It was that moment when I was informed by my landlady that I would have to 30 days to move as she was moving back into the place that I had been renting from her. She was cool about it, but F&$K!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I really haven’t in the past enjoyed moving and something that I would have tried to put off at least until October if it had been up to me at the time. I'm just too fragile now, I had been telling myself.
I tried to wish it away, but it didn’t work. I soon had to give up my argument with reality and actually find a new place to live that would be in alignment with my journey this year of reconnecting with radiant health.
Sure enough, I found an even better place than the one I had been living at and very close by as well,so the move would turn out to be one of the easiest that I had ever experienced. For the cards I had been dealt, it was among the best solutions I could have hoped for.
As I began to pack up my stuff into boxes, I sank… I didn’t really feel previously that I actually had so much “stuff”, however, when I began to see all the boxes around me I felt like I was drowning in it. As the sweat spouted out of my crown, I was all too aware of just how emotionally crippling my attachment to all this “stuff” is. All the boxes felt as large as my stomach and just as attached. I had put off packing for as long as could, not allowing anyone to help me (although I had been asked by friends nearly a dozen times if I needed any help. I did, yet at the time I was so much in my own way and I wasn’t able to just allow them).
When I looked at it all, the thought occurred to me to just trash it all. Would I miss the “stuff”? Then I experienced this agonizing conflict inside… a tug of war. As the sweat poured, I just felt so much self hatred. In that moment, all of my "spiritual development" (whatever that means), appeared to be no much for this burn.
I decided to escape and I headed out to the Arclight (perhaps the best movie theater in Los Angeles). I couldn’t even tell you what movie I saw as I don’t remember now.
After my ticket was ripped, I bought a large popcorn (without butter) and a small root beer. Like a drunk in the dark of the theater, I ghoulishly shoved popcorn into my mouth, alone in the second row, spilling much of it all over and down my shirt while guzzling the root beer.
As this was the most toxic food experience I’ve had since I embraced a plant based food plan and a path of Ahimsa (and for sure, the way I was inhaling the popcorn and soda sure felt like the opposite of NON-Violence), I soon became aware into the movie how much salt I had just taken down and I began to feel ill in gnarly way. Thankfully, I couldn’t finish the popcorn and walked out of the theater just sad and too numb to cry.
The next day during the final hours of my preparations before I was to move 24 hours later, I checked my Facebook account and saw some messages that I hadn’t expected to receive.
It was then that I was reminded that it was Jon Bergen’s birthday. I had forgotten. Too caught up in my own self loathing.
If it would have been a year before, I most likely would have picked up the phone and called Jon. I would have told him how much I loved him and how thankful I was that he was alive on the planet, and that his birthday was a cause for a great celebration. He would have said thanks and that his birthday was no big deal, that he loved me too and how great it was that we got to be friends. I would have probably sent him a gift of perhaps a live lecture from Wayne Dyer or maybe even Ram Dass, or maybe even a Springsteen or Counting Crowes bootleg that he didn’t yet have.
I didn’t do that this year.
Jon Bergen, left his body last August. The result of a head on collision car accident. For over a decade, I was fortunate enough to be able to call him one of my closest allies… a key member of my inner circle of wisdom and support. A best friend. We spoke nearly every day. We could go sharing hours together without looking at the clock. Long drives all over California... Arizona... a trip to New Orleans for Jazz Fest. We bonded over our true love for music, movies, classic tv, literature, laughter and great art. Jon loved to talk. And I loved talking to him. I loved being his friend. I never imagined that he would go before I did. Whenever I pictured life, Jon was in it.
What can I say about Jon? There ain’t enough room on this blog.
If you were his friend, you were lucky. He was the very definition of the perfect friend. Jon is someone, for whom there is no replacement. Think of a person in your life that would be absolutely unimaginable to lose. For me, it was Jon.
What I didn’t realize at the time he was alive, was that more than a friend, Jon would go on to be one of the most important teachers in my life. In the last five years of his time here, Jon did an extraordinary amount of work on improving himself. He was able to give up much of his anger and became really concerned with helping people. Jon was able to be of service in his own special way. Heart to heart, friend to friend. He was the best listener I ever knew. You could get him on the phone at 3am on Tuesday if you had to, and he would be fully alert and with you. It brought him so much joy to be an instrument of peace and he was able to develop his presence to new levels of awareness with each passing year of recent.
I would always laugh at him when he would acknowledge me for being such an important friend to him, having introduced him to the work of Wayne Dyer, getting him started on his journey of spiritual awakening. Years before that, he had asked me with an honest inquisitive nature to explain about Ram Dass and my relationship with my guru Neem Karoli Baba, whom my parents were with in India before I was born…. I remember lashing out at him, and that I didn’t want him “questioning” me about this… that it was too personal.
I've greatly since regretted that.
Our last words to each other was over text message. We had just gotten off the phone where Jon had helped me let go over so much anger I had over a rock band I had been intensely working with after our relations had just went south. As usual, Jon was there to cool the flames and help me land the plane down to a peaceful place.
I had been alone in a seedy casino in Vegas after business trip there, and had sat down to a steak dinner. It dawned on me, although I had just spoken with him for hours, to text Jon to thank him again for his help with “diffusing my anger”, right after I had placed my order for a petite fillet mignon, medium/rare.
He texted back “Have you been meditating lately?”. I hadn’t been. Not for quite some time. That was Jon’s way of saying, “Dude, MEDITATE!”.
I looked up at that moment and saw what was at the table in front of me. A family of four, headed by a large man who probably weighed close to 400 lbs, devouring as much food as he could stuff into him. His wife grabbed his arm, pleading with him to slow down. His children, a boy and girl who couldn’t have been older than 14, hung their heads in shame.
I was in so much pain when I saw this, as I felt I was glancing at my future self, and if I did live long enough to have a family, what it might have looked like all these years later if I did not change what I had been doing with myself. I was probably somewhere myself around 320 lbs and on my way up and out.
I feverishly, like a drowning man in shock after having just been rescued, texted Jon, “THANK YOU!!!!! You have no idea man what your words just meant. It is EXACTLY what I needed to hear right now. I can’t wait to tell you what happened just now. We’ll speak when you get home from your trip”. (we had already spoken on the phone for so many hours at that point about the rock band and we were both blown out).
Then Jon texted me “If you are taking anger management advice from me, you really got problems”. What he was referring to, is that Jon spent much of his life being a “hothead” and one of the most heated debaters out there. You didn’t wanna tangle with this guy. And although he dramatically dissolved and resolved so much of that side of his being in the last few years of his life, he knew it lurked under the surface if he didn’t continue to work on himself. One other thing about Jon, he was so funny. And he would do anything to make you laugh if you were his friend.
As I laughed at what would be the last joke, I looked up and took in the horror of the image of my future self sitting at the next table with his family shoveling in as much as he could take and somewhere inside, I knew that I would have to change and transform.
I got the call from a mutual friend a few mornings later that Jon didn’t make it home from his weekend trip. I never got to tell him about what happened in that moment at the steak house. I spent the next month sobbing like I didn’t know I had it in me, not sure if I would be able to survive it.
It wasn’t until two months later after I had wished I could die (in my own experience, I had related to Neal Peart’s take on it in his book “Ghost Rider” describing what is was like to lose his wife and daughter in the same year, and he had said “I’m only alive because I cannot die”), that I had set off on my own healing road.
It was when I began to receive the assistance from Dr. Wyatt Woodsmall who was teaching me and a few others the way of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), in a technique called “Time Line Therapy”, where I was taught to transmute the grief of losing Jon into gratitude. Gratitude, in that I got to know him in the way I was able to... Gratitude that we got to be such good good friends.
In the beginning of the year, I had received the second of two meetings with Jon’s spirit. And it was in that second time where I was fully delivered onto the healing shores of peace and there was no more sadness. Only love.
Now, 6 months later, 50 lbs lighter, and feeling so completely and utterly vulnerable… I became overwhelmed with sorrow after being reminded of the first marking of Jon’s birthday since he left.
The revisit of my old ghost of grief was so surprising and blinding. I had believed that I was “over that kind of thing” as there has been so much joy this year since I’ve thought of Jon. Joy in my reflection of what a wonderful being he was, and how truly blessed I was to even get to know him in any way, let alone share enough friendship in 10 years to last a lifetime.
I didn’t really know what to do with a new-found revision of sadness. I wasn't sure how I could "handle" that.
I did know what I wasn’t going to do. I was not going to go have an In And Out Burger… I wasn’t going to harm myself by trying to use food to escape. My popcorn and root beer experience was an isolated one.
I don't want to hurt myself any more. I've spent too many years treating my self with such unkindness. I haven't had much experience yet being good to myself.
If we have been harming ourselves, perhaps even for a LONG time and we actually do want to change... the beginning starts with a sincere desire to stop. It is then we begin to put an end to massacring our soul. You don't get to 300 lbs without bloodshed.
I'm learning. Breathe in and literally eat "non violence", "non killing", "non anger". Embrace Ahimsa. Exhale peace.
The truth is, I'm still not sure why it can sometimes be so hard. I'm practicing anyway. In each bite, I'm improving.
The next day, I moved into my new place. As no one lives below me now, I plan on getting a trampoline as Otto told me that 20 minutes a day on that thing will be a game changer, activating my lymphatic system at new levels.
I went to the Euphoria Loves Rawvolution café and got my living plant based food. I went to the gym. Even though so much of me wanted to cancel my breathwork session with healer Michael Baker that week because “I was too tired”, I knew that it was essential that I show up. I did. It turned out to be one of the most important sessions I ever experienced.
I want to live.
I went to see Krishna Das when he came to LA. The next night I went to see the great “hugging saint” Ammachi and received her blessing at 6am. Saturday night, I went to see Jon’s favorite band of all time, U2.
As Bono and the Edge sang an acoustic version of “Stuck In A Moment”, a song that Jon and I sang together over many car rides, I dialed up my dear friend now business partner Bo Caldwell at Bender Music Group, the company that Jon and Bo created together, and included him in a tender moment with 50,000.
And as the last words rang out “It’s just a moment, this time will pass”, I felt Jon’s embrace. Friend, teacher, and now Guardian Angel.
It was enough to get me to the end of this blog as a new page turns into the next chapter. I’m still unpacking my new place, with life continuing to bring in more new as the sun comes up and down. Yes, it can and is all happening. Life does life, we gain, we lose and we on the healing road as we journey further up the mountain, get to stay in the game today throughout it all… no matter what the waves may bring in and up.
I want to live.
The Intelligentsia organic black coffee tastes good, Kelp “noodles” in the Pad Thai variety are at the cafe (these days, I don't do time at the steakhouse) and I’m looking forward to the magic of summer. I wish you the very finest that life and love have to offer.
It's an "inside job"
More will be revealed.
Yours in heart,
Shiva
PS - Here is Bono and The Edge singing "Stuck In A Moment" from the concert I saw Saturday night. You will feel Jon's heart and smile when you watch and listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyg1W0dQoK4&feature=related
