The Long Road Home to Myself

It Wasn’t Enlightenment. It Was Just Me, Finally.

I was really into working out. And running.

Back in my late 20s, my fitness routine was 100% those two things—running 7 miles a day, 4–5 times a week, and pushing weights around at a Crunch Fitness in lower Manhattan. This was back in the ’90s, so it was a very DIY-type situation—no TikTok trends to go by.

“You should try a yoga class,” my workout buddy said.
“Um, sure.” I replied, generally up for a new adventure.

And it was in that yoga class that I had my first taste.

I couldn’t do any of the yoga poses. My hips were locked up. My back was beyond tight. I had no core strength. So I flailed and flopped around for the hour, mostly trying not to look like too much of an idiot, given there was a substantial number of attractive women within sweating distance.

Towards the end of the class, I found myself in some approximation of a shoulder stand, with a helping hand from the teacher, As I somehow managed to settle into the position, the teacher belted out in the best AM radio voice I’d ever heard the words that become the hilarious start to the next decade of my life:

“Now, friends … try to relax. Give your body a brief respite from the ravages of gravity.”

The cynical New Yorker—the only version of me I knew at that time—could’ve busted out laughing. But for some reason, his words hit me in that moment. And for a few seconds, I felt free.

Free of my incessant mind.
Free of my very-not-limber body.
Free of wanting or needing to be anywhere else but there.

That was my first lesson in something that I still need reminding of every day, nearly 30 years later.

Happiness is not being able to touch your toes.
It’s being able to stay present to the moment no matter how difficult, stressful, or undesirable the position you find yourself in.

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It started on that sweaty mat back in 1996, as a stressed-out, stuck-in-his-mind, starving-for-intimacy law student. I was hooked. That tiny moment short-circuited my overstuffed and over-educated brain and touched something deeper.

There was a longing. With that and my first experiences of meditation, a chasm opened up between my day-to-day experience of myself and this other thing I had tasted for the first time—a world beyond my mind. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t attempt to close that gap. The impulse to go deeper was so strong it would have been existential malpractice to ignore it.

The road took me to San Francisco—to not just practice, but to get trained to teach meditation, yoga, and get certified in a form of somatic psychotherapy. These were the honeymoon days of the journey. Around every corner, a new experience. A fresh insight. A feeling that I was breaking free of something.

Towards what, I couldn’t exactly say—other than what I’d read in books—but I was sure I was headed in the right direction. And then I got stuck.

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The most humbling moments in life are when you think you’ve accomplished something that you haven’t. When it becomes obvious you have to go back over ground you’d already declared victory over. And the embarrassment, for the things you said to yourself and others about how far you’d come.

That was me in the mid-2000s. Ten years into the journey, to discover that my advanced state was all smoke and mirrors.

I had a mountain of insights and spiritual attainments which gave me no comfort at all as I sat in my beautiful San Francisco apartment, by myself after a tough breakup, with a failing business I couldn’t wait to get out of, and a creeping dread that I had somehow missed a turn along the road—and there was no going back.

But the right road finds you.
Over and over again.
Until you follow it.

An old friend turned me on to a reclusive teacher, and a small group of people doing a kind of emotional work that I immediately knew was my next step.

“There’s no such thing as a negative emotion,” the teacher said.

And wow, did I want to believe that, based on all the negative emotions I had inside of me, the ones I knew and the ones I didn’t. I moved to Oregon to follow him. Over the next eight years, I was part of a hardcore group of folks who were, in one way or another, just like me. Spiritual seekers who found themselves at a dead end on their journey but were honest enough to admit it.

The heart of the work was as simple as it was grueling:

The path to an honest spirituality starts by giving up the desire to be spiritual,
and, instead, focusing on the wounded human in the mirror instead.

In other words, while God is real and enlightenment is possible, in practical terms, there’s an order to how to go about it. If you have someone in your life who has an active relationship with the divine, you’ve seen the challenge firsthand: if you are easily connected with spirit, then it’s hard to take seriously your partner’s annoyance at you always being late for things. It’s too easy to bypass daily life, to live (or at least believe you are living) above and beyond it.

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It was the giant red flag warning I’d read about early on my journey. Watch out for Spiritual Materialism, the trap most seekers fall into of using spirituality to reinforce the ego (It’s Still You, But New and improved: Now Spiritual!) instead of dismantling it. The internet, and especially the podcastisphere, is full of people subtly or not-subtly taking spiritual ideas out of context, ideas that were formulated in the context of a collectivistic and pre-egoic culture, and using them to negate or transcend your actual human life. In other words, taking advantage of people in pain.

And here was a teacher who was no-bullshit going to hold all of us accountable for not falling into that trap. He was the David Goggins of psycho-emotional work, and I loved him for it.

(He was also a deeply wounded narcissist—but that’s for another day.)

He firmly put an end to my fledgling spiritual quest in favor of a human one. He assured me, and all of us, that if we did the work to heal at the emotional level, we would get to that spiritual destination, or at least be prepared to go on that part of the journey, as a result.

Maybe this is starting to sound a bit theoretical, so let’s bring it back down to the heart of what this work was about. It was essentially this:

We are emotional beings first.
Mental beings second.
Physical beings third.

Meaning it’s our subterranean emotional world that is powering what we think and what gets stored in our physical body, not the other way around. And so, logically, the path to healing had to be a merciless search for the ways the mind had convinced us of its primacy. To use the heart and our capacity to feel, however weak it was, to wrestle control of our being from the mind. In fairness, there’s reasonable debate in some circles about which is more upstream in terms of the starting point for healing, the physical body or the emotional one, but just about everyone’s aligned that it ain’t the mind.

All of its strategies, accommodations, manipulations, control mechanisms—everything that the mind uses to create certainty, to know, to be right, to be separate, including (and this is the ultimate mindfuck) the manipulative use of wounded emotion, to play the victim, to be ashamed, to be depressed, to be a sinner. Because a mind playing defense can and will use all of those things. It will tell all the sad stories you are willing to hear, to keep you away, to keep its host away from seeing it for the charlatan that it is. Because the one thing it can’t do is let go, even if it says it wants to.

It must be relieved of duty by something, someone, stronger. Like I tried to reverse, or at least relieve the effects of gravity on my spine by turning upside down all those years before, the mind needs to be turned upside down and held by another force so that letting go can happen. But here the stakes are far higher, because now we’re talking about identity. And because your mind is there to protect you from harm, it will not go quietly.

It has to be pulled apart, gently but firmly and consistently, to make room for that other thing to emerge, for us to feel the existence of something we all have but have all been conditioned into forgetting:

Our emotional body.

The eight years I spent in that work were the least joyful, least fun, and least relaxing years of my life. It was a day-to-day torture chamber of my own making. I paid for the workshops. I went to the private sessions. I said yes, over and over, to continuing it when I could’ve walked away at any time.

Why?

Because while everything about my teacher and his methods was, as the kids say these days, problematic, it was undeniably working. It was helping me do the one thing that no other thing I had tried could do, which was to build some kind of minimal ability to feel my way through life instead of being forever locked in the persuasive echo chamber of my mind.

I began to feel differently about, and to, myself. Life began to open up to me. I met the love of my life. I could hear my calling, well, call (funny how we use the word calling, something drawing us towards it, and then think it’s something we figure out for ourselves). My moment-to-moment experience of life was objectively better at every level. Not because I’d finally arrived at Nirvana, but because I’d shed just enough of the inherited noise—emotional wounds, family myths, and cultural definitions of success—to hear something more honest underneath.

Not a voice from beyond, but the one I’d been born with. My own.

I’d wriggled myself just free enough of my emotional wounds, my family, and societal conditioning about what it meant to be a man, to be successful, or to be happy.

I had not finished the emotional work. I have not today, 10 years later.
But I reached a foothold of consciousness that I will never again fall below.

I know when I’ve left myself, and I know how to come back.

When I left that work and that group 10 years ago, I had fully overdosed on personal work. I joked with my wife at the time that maybe I’d start journaling again in 10 years. Well, turns out that was about right. It helped that we were broke, so there was no time to think too much about it. I threw myself into my work, launching and building my first business, writing my first book, raising our two girls, and trying to heal from the abusive and traumatic parts of those years while holding onto the deep truths that had changed me for the better.

And then, on just another normal Saturday morning, a few weeks back, the door, a door I had long since been sure had closed for good, cracked open. My wife and little one went out for the day to do some mother-daughter things. While there’s always work I could do, nothing was burning at the moment, and I wasn’t in the mood anyway. I checked the surf report and the conditions were crap. I fumbled around YouTube for a bit, but it was a lot more of the same. I called a few people, but nobody was around. Nothing worked.

Out of options, I had no choice but to turn inward! I realized I was resisting a feeling. The feeling was a sense of meaninglessness, a kind of dread. It hit me right in my core wound, the feeling that nothing matters. It was the same feeling I had as a depressed teenager, the one that drew me to major in philosophy, that sent me off the deep end to eastern mysticism and psychedelics, and radical forms of therapy. My first thought was, “I can’t believe it.” After all these years and all this work, I still haven’t healed that?”

And then, after I wrestled with that one for a bit, came the deeper one, the one that put me back on course: “I can’t believe it, after all these years and all this work, I’m still trying to run from it.” I could feel myself turning again, now toward the pain, to feel into the uncomfortable position, instead of trying to escape.

“I hear you,”, I said to the feeling/voice in my head. “I get that for you, nothing has meaning. That you feel empty. That you feel lost. That must be very scary. All I can tell you is that I'm here. And that you mean something to me.”

The feeling didn’t go away. I didn’t need it to. I just needed to come back to myself, to be with it, to feel. I’m sure I’ll be back with that feeling again soon, and you will too. Maybe it’ll be the next time the money feels tight, the traffic is driving you to rage, your coworkers are letting you down, or you're just bored with nothing to do on a Saturday. No matter how long it takes for us to realize we’ve gotten stuck in the trap of trying to keep whatever it is away, the moment we do, we’re already halfway back to ourselves.

To get present to the moment, no matter how difficult, stressful, or undesirable the position we find ourselves in.

And breathe.

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TL;DR: We are emotional beings first. And maybe, just maybe, we’re converging at a point of human consciousness where we will move beyond the mind-first paradigm and re-learn how to feel. Is it a coincidence that at this very moment, a technology has emerged and is sweeping the globe that is rapidly demonstrating to us that it can do mind-only stuff better than we can? That while it’s terrible at going from zero to one, once you give it an idea, a spark, it can run circles around us? It’s almost as if the universe is conspiring to get us to let go, not to become mindless, but to break out of the trance that our mind is what makes us special, that it is the source of who we are, instead of the receiver. That we are being called, as a species, to bring ourselves back to life.

We’ve been out on a long road. It’s time to come home.