‘The best you can do is get good at being you’ - ‘Dennis the Menace’ (Hank Ketcham)

I had a nice Sunday morning.  At 9am I was sat at my laptop logging into a Trans-Atlantic zoom chat with the wonderfully wise Runa Bouius, after we’d recently connected on LinkedIn.  The conversation was warm, especially considering we’ve only just met (in this life at least), and marked by a mutual willingness to discuss, non-defensively and at depth, the respective stories of our lives.  Neither of us spared ourselves the difficult, melancholic narratives or natural fears that inevitably come with life-paths implicitly influenced by a reaching beyond the ‘known’ of our own minds.  We both know well, it seems, the wisdom in emptiness, suffering and loss.  But there was, at least in my experience, also a deep communion to be had in the sharing of the lived-out intention of our respective lives, of honouring both our personal uniqueness and underlying sense of mystery in service to the world; A shared understanding that ‘to get good at being you’ was to both come to appreciate the hologram of our individuality and to sink gradually into the deeper reality of our lives beyond the personal ‘I’.

Probably the earliest memory that remains deeply impressed upon my psyche, is of sitting on the edge of my bed with eyes tightly shut at 3 or 4 years of age. I’d breathe deeply and do my best to sink into an inner darkness beyond what I dimly suspected was just the surface experience of things in my mind.  On reflection, it was perhaps the most blessedly simple practice of my life before the spiritual baggage accumulated around a more ‘sophisticated’ life of practice.  My first psychoanalyst remarked that I was probably practicing something close to ‘pure Zen’. A deeply introverted little boy (with a curly afro that would have made Leo Sayer insanely jealous), I was already aware of the anxiety of those around me, correlated seemingly to my unwillingness to speak (at all) outside of my home.  It was not that I couldn’t talk but that I purposefully wouldn’t.  I remember feeling profoundly settled in silence and knew already that the personally truer expression of experience was often found beyond language; Words somehow innately felt a hindrance and frustration to describe my inner world or that which I experienced in others.  They lacked the immediacy of a prior naked awareness and remained powerless to convey the secrets of deep silence. 

In my bedroom, surrounded by the comforting congregation of teddy bears on my bed, I was also safe enough to explore whatever it was that I intuited was beyond my nascent mind and growing identity.  One bear, I named ‘Christopher’, offered particular steady comfort and in my adult life I have come to realise that ‘Christopher’ is derived from the Koine Greek ‘Christophoros’, meaning ‘bearing Christ’. The practice, however, was not without its deeply felt dread. I remember the terror of empty darkness in my young minds-eye, and my ‘practice’ was only sustained by a core grace-infused awareness that there was indeed a loving presence held somewhere within or beyond the movement towards absolute absence of light.

Only in adult life have I gained the comfort of the awareness of a lineage of ‘apophatic’ contemplative practice involving practices of negation, or inner darkness. The memory concludes with the hearing of my mother calling my name from another part of the house, and the flash of insight, like a terrible lightning bolt of intuition, that the ‘Danny’ she was calling was one deeply loved by her but necessarily different from the ‘not-Danny’ beyond words or names.  I have lived with that implicit contemplative knowledge ever since and it remains a whisper behind all that I encounter and experience.

I have come to imagine contemplative practice and the working out of integrating the bittersweet knowing of my younger self, as intimately bound up with the pith wisdom alluded to in Ketcham’s trickster figure ‘Dennis’.  It has not always been so easy to bring that little boy's tentative mystical intuition into the world and I’ve suffered the inevitable mistakes and humiliations along the way.  There are doubtless others to yet unfold and be digested in coming years.  But in my deeply democratic dialogue with Runa earlier, I was reminded, perhaps both within her and within me, of the profound existential relaxation and comfort to be had in re-approaching our earlier self in humble admiration and kindly witness; The wisdom of a deep inner bow to the simple intuitions of a child without the right words or a complicated cognitive understanding.  A ‘self’ closer to the heart. I am reminded that so often in adult life, with our various identities, responsibilities and plans to live up to, we miss what we are ultimately looking for - to be truly ourselves - because it is so close; Our vision is often focused beyond the immediate, on a reality ‘out there’, one bound up with an imagined future version of ourselves conditioned by the multi-layered consensus view of things and the ever-partial ‘facts’ of our lives.  But when we design and value space to be able to contemplatively return to being-with what is timelessly and truly looking out through our eyes, the entirety of this human life is re-invited into awareness.  

I have come to realise somewhat that my most satisfying, meaningful and productive work, whether with curious souls in psychotherapy or in providing contemplative not-knowing space to organisations, has unfolded when I have acceded to the irresistible tendency in me towards silence, contemplative space and a psychological emptiness.  It is the sweet spot of professional life, the meeting point between the innate hologram of my individual self and that which is, in us all, quite beyond the reach of the senses or the mind.  I’ve begun to realise that in relaxing into ‘getting good at being you’, I am gradually and psychologically circling back towards that little boy on the edge of his bed. 

Perhaps I might get there in the end…

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