“Down in the Roots of my Life …”

by Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®

I have a very personal story to share with you. I feel as though I’ve spent the last two years sailing round the world to come back home. Two years ago I had to let go of The Art of Being. I couldn’t fault what was happening for participants in my workshops and I loved teaching as much as I’d ever done. Transformation, celebration, healing, and all those moments of joy, laughter and the magical: it was all happening! And yet one day I knew, from a place deeper than I could reach, that I had to walk away. I had come to a point where the only time I felt really at peace was in the workshops. In my personal life I was on my knees. I was exhausted, and I had lost my integrity, betraying a woman I loved deeply and destroying our relationship in the process. My loaded schedule of workshops, and the months of being on the road that went with it, had become a marathon with an endlessly receding finishing line.

The discrepancy between my work and my life was unbearable. For a little while I thought I would stop teaching completely and for ever. At the time I needed to think that! Once I had made the decision to stop, however, it became clear that what I essentially needed was to go through something in myself, without knowing what the final outcome would be. I did believe that I had to let go of The Art of Being and hand the reins over to a new generation of teachers. I imagined that if I chose to teach again, it would be in a new framework. That was all secondary, though, to the overwhelming urge to go down, to go deep down into my old darkness where I hadn’t been for a long time.

I found someone I could trust to guide me, to catch me in those critical moments when I might otherwise have turned back or lost trust in going where I needed to go. I made a commitment to the journey, and for a year I turned my attention inwards and delved into the pain, fear and grief that, for all the inner work I’d done, still afflicted the deepest roots of my life. To go there was not hard. I’d been this way many times before, and guided many others on similar journeys. I just needed to go further, deeper. I had the sense of something buried, and that I’d always known it was waiting for me to unearth it.

In my personal devastation I felt destiny driving me. Not for the first time in my life, ‘the still small voice’ that I totally revere yet sometimes stubbornly resist, was clear in its demand of me. The hour always comes when I have to listen! I can look back through my life and see all the unequivocal moments when the chips were down and there was finally nothing else to do. Whenever I’ve gotten there, I’ve always felt a bit like a kid who has been wilfully bad for as long as he could get away with it. Somewhere beyond all his complaints about how tough things are, he knows that he made it all happen! You could call it karma! It is, too, but for me there’s more understanding in recognizing that this is indeed what it means to let the art of being become my way of life. I live what I have to live, including my errors, and existence responds, giving me what I need that opens, awakens and transforms me. It may be ecstasy, it may be agony, and whatever it is has everything to do with what I really mean.

Discovering what we really mean can be the hardest part. It’s hardly ever what we think we mean, and to find it we have to delve far deeper than our thinking. We have to feel our way into the depths of our psyche. Often we don’t want to recognize what we find there. It’s usually not very complimentary to who we think we are! And once we find out what we really mean, are we ready to take responsibility? This is at least easy to do – if we are willing! - and it sometimes enables us to discover what we really mean. “Oh, look at what is happening in my life now! It’s terrible! And I created it!”. When we take responsibility we accept completely life’s response to what we have created. We embrace our karma! Yes, embrace! Wholeheartedly!

Our Odyssey, our work, is to get to that whole-heartedness, and that means making friends with whatever we come across in ourselves that is in the way. We have to embrace our demons, we have to make friends with what lurks in our inner darkness. This is how we heal our psychological wounds. Before we get there the only thing that’s whole-hearted is our complaining. I choose to believe that life always waits until we’re ready to go our healing journeys; and ready always feels like, “No, please no!” and the lie that goes with it: “I didn’t mean this!” We prefer to see ourselves as innocent victims, until we fall, until we surrender. Then truth can happen and a new depth of befriending can begin. This, once again, was what I had to do now.

Letting go, and falling, was an immense relief. So too was journeying into my underworld, even though the loneliness I encountered within myself was as shocking to me as it was abysmal. Most shocking, though, was who I found there. Sometimes walking through the underworld we remember and relive nightmares that actually happened. Or we may find ourselves, as I did now, in a dream-world of images and happenings that are only real as symbols of what we experienced. The child in us makes of our wounds a picture, a mythic world. If we enter it, we find who we must find, who we are seeking, who we are afraid of, who we must befriend within our wounded psyche.

Who I found was the ghost of a child. I found him in a vast, concrete underground building made of endless corridors and hollow, cold, empty rooms with no way out, where he lived as a ghost because that was the only way not to be terrified by his abandonment. Instead he was petrified and insubstantial, a wraith. It was the state I had taken refuge in to survive the orphanage where I spent five years of my childhood. Bringing him out of there into my life was as vivid and touching to me as bringing a dead child back to life. For many weeks he kept going back into his ghost-house, not because he liked it – he dreaded it! – but out of habit.

I gradually learned to sense the changes that happened in my ordinary daily life whenever he was once again locked in his burial chamber. I could feel the coldness, the “I don’t care”. I could make it look good too – playing cool in that way that is actually cultivated and admired in our culture. In fact it is quite deadly and deadening. It’s a state in which we can do anything we dare to do, without needing to look after the things and people we actually love, because “it’s OK, I don’t care!”

Very soon, however, I came to love the process of befriending this ghost, watching him come alive and find the warmth, playfulness, humor and happiness that I know in myself. It is not after all that he has characteristics that I lacked. It is that he has come out of his lonely tomb and is one with the life I am. Wordsworth said, “The child is father of the man.”I know what he means. All that I am I find in him, all that he is I am.

The healing in all this is what has happened to me through bringing him back to life with me. He was only willing to come if I cared. This was what I still had to learn. His gift to me has been showing me that to be happy, I have to care for that which I love. I am hoping you can catch the immensity of this! I have loved so much; all my life I have loved! Miraculously, despite all that went wrong in my childhood, being able to love did not get damaged in me. I think I have to thank my mother for this.

What did get damaged was caring for what I love! I can look back through my life and see the countless times that I did not care, neither for the people nor the things that I loved. Not caring was a way to be safe; but it never made me happy. The saddest things that I have brought about in my life, all the things I most regret, come from my not caring. That is how significant it is!

I feel for all the people I know and have known who have learned not to care. It is a very male thing, the antithesis of the mother’s love, though it afflicts countless people, both men and women. It’s as though the child is saying to his mother or father or both, “I can’t deny my need for your love, and I can’t trust your love to be there for me. And fuck it, I love you too! So the best I can do is just not to care!”. The note of aggression is real. Not caring is both defense and attack; my “I don’t care” attitude protected me, and at the same time it of course hurt others. And that’s what touches me – the realization of the millions and millions of people all over the world who are hurting others, especially those they love, because they have learned “I don’t care” as a way to survive.

I remember a hypnotherapy process I went through nearly twenty years ago, in which I discovered that much of my personal motivation for my work came from wanting to make people care. I wanted them to care the way my parents didn’t, the way my teachers didn’t, the way the nuns didn’t, I wanted them to care so that I’d be happier. What I disregarded was my own “I don’t care!”. It got me into a lot of trouble and caused a lot of needless pain to myself and others; and the hardest thing about it was that at root I couldn’t stop caring. I always cared, and so I suffered more than anyone knew from doing things out of not caring. This made me unhappy, and I so wanted to be happy. The perfect dilemma!

It’s taken me half a life-time to learn that to be happy I have to keep caring, no matter what! Ah, we teach what we need to learn! No wonder my wish for people to care has been such passionate inspiration to me!

It isn’t that I have now suddenly learned to care. My whole adult life has been about restoring all that was knocked out of me as a kid. The last thirty-four years, especially, have been my journey of awakening into love, compassion and awareness: caring lives, like the presence of the mother, in the love and compassion. Still, I begin to see this past two years as yet another of those landmarks that stand out in my life – one of those episodes that changed everything.

Although we haven’t had any communication for nearly two years, I feel the deepest gratitude to the woman whose uncompromising clarity precipitated my fall. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to give her my apology personally. That would be good. In the meantime, I want to say sorry to all the people I’ve ever hurt through not caring. I ask you all for your understanding and forgiveness. In return, I’m seeking to find love and understanding, instead of judgment, for those who hurt others with their not caring. It’s a meditation, and not so easy. My own experience helps a lot.

And how can I ever thank all the dear friends who kept on caring anyway? One of you, on reading this, wrote to me, " I know that there are people who went away because you didn't care. I know that there are people who stayed with you because they cared (and who trusted that in your very special way you were caring, too). I'm not just talking about myself!” I do thank you all for your amazing trust. I guess the best way I can express my thanks is by being also the kind of friend who keeps on being there anyway.

When I was eighteen I wrote a poem: its last line was, “Down in the roots of my life there lies a diamond”. I have been diamond-mining. Liberated and cared for, this diamond’s radiance is called happiness. I wish it to be everybody’s. The child in me, unrealistic and free to wish for anything, wishes to reach everyone who has learned not to care, and help them reclaim their buried treasure, so that they can be happy, and so that they don’t have to go on spoiling and destroying what they love.

So much of the world’s misery stems from “I don’t care”, and the misery will always come home. Many people have discovered this, tragically, when they were too old to do anything but live and die in their misery. It’s where we come to when the not-caring has won, when we’ve succeeded in destroying what we refused to care for. The grief comes home to us because in the end who we didn’t care for is the one saying, “I don’t care!” The only good thing about our anguish then is that, if it doesn’t destroy us, it can force us, as it did me, to go in search of what we’ve lost – not just the child in us, but our care for that child. In our healing we become our own mother and father! Osho, my old Master, used to say that awareness and love are the two wings of being, the two banks between which the river of life flows. What I see now is not two, but three; a sacred Trinity, and unlike the Christian Trinity, it’s at least half female! There is love, there is awareness; and there is caring too.

As I said at the beginning, I have gone round the world to come back home. I find myself where I did not expect to be – recognizing and accepting happily that I am here to teach the art of being. Two years ago I wanted to not care about it any more. I thought I could give it away. Now, home again, I see that I have to care for my creations. Of course! To be happy, I have to care for the things I love.