lara owen

My new book (co-authored with Cherry Gilchrist) has just been published by Hay House, and is now available in bookstores throughout the UK, and from Amazon internationally. 

To find out more and for updates on media appearances and press mentions please visit the book’s very own web site at http://lovebegins40.com

“You may think that Gods are the ones who give you benefits, and Demons cause damage; but it may be the other way round. Those who cause pain teach you to be patient, and those who give you presents may keep you from practicing the Dharma. So it depends on their effect on you if they are Gods or Demons”.

Machig Labdron 

Machig Labdron (1055-1149) was a famous Tibetan yogini who developed the practice of Chod. 

and then there is this one:

“If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.” Thomas Hardy

There is a direct relationship between tolerating/accepting paradox and spiritual and psychological maturity (inner peace). There are many paradoxes to encounter in life. For example, we think having plenty of money generates happiness, but then we realize this is true and also not true, because large amounts of money tend to complicate relationships and can present huge difficulties. 

The  core paradox of life is that while now we are alive, we know that one day we will die, as will those we love and rely upon. At a certain point we have to stop scrambling around this and accept it as best we can. Often it is the first time we go through the serious illness and/or death of someone very close to us that we are forced by circumstance to confront this core dilemma of being human. Cognitively this is almost impossible to handle, but spiritually it is completely possible. The release into acceptance liberates a lot of energy that was previously tied up in coping with existential anxiety.

I walked Balthazar this afternoon a little way along the lane to the next village, accessible from my village by a path that runs along the edge of the mountain. On the way back we met a sad-looking older woman, small, hunched, in a dark red coat with a green scarf, and hair dyed a light brown. She looked curiously at B’s head collar and asked me if he was méchant. No, I said, he just pulls a lot and this collar lets me control him without hurting my back or his neck. We chatted for a while. She wanted to know where I lived, where I was from, how many languages I spoke.

It turned out she was from Portugal originally, and had moved here with her Portugese husband in the 1960’s to work in the sausage factory in Durfort. They had built a house next door to the factory. She retired eight years ago, and her husband died two years ago after forty years of marriage. She has a daughter in Toulouse and a sister who had also worked in the factory and built a house next to hers. I said it was good to have family close by, and she shook her head, “Oui, mais la vie est dure”. It became clear this was her mantra. She kept repeating “La vie est dure” (life is hard) over and over, interspersed with tales of trouble, heartbreak, incurable illness and death. There were her husband’s last years, his fatal illness, her own heart trouble, and her intense loneliness without him. But this was just for starters.

I tried to do my Bodhisattva best to remind her that good things are always happening along with the difficult, that spring is nearly here, and even lamely pointed to the blossom on a nearby tree, but she wasn’t interested and countered by telling me about her sister-in-law in Canada whose husband had just lost an arm to cancer, describing the gory details of the amputation. She possessed endless examples of pain and suffering. As she talked on she became utterly sunk into sadness and began to cry. I tried to give her a hug but no, she didn’t want it. She was in her comfort zone, the long interminable recounting of woe. After ten minutes or so of this, I felt bored and wanted to leave: there was an addicted toxicity to her misery that repelled me. There seemed to be nothing I could do to help; that once started, nothing would stop or relieve her other than my leaving. I gently said goodbye.

As I walked away she shouted after me, “Vous avez des enfants?” and I said, “Non”, and carried on walking, thinking I had just met the spirit of sadness. It dawned on me how remarkable it was that she tuned into exactly the wound that would open up my own grief, but thankfully it turned out that there was nothing there any more but acceptance of my fate. I thought about my miscarriages and the years I spent yearning for a child that never came. This used to provoke me to instant misery, but now the only feeling was of softness, of compassion for my young, frustrated self, and relief at the distance I now have to that time of struggle and suffering.

And then I heard the merry ring of a bicycle and turned to see Madam Blaquier, a woman who lives in the village and used to run a little antique shop in the shadow of the 15th century clocher until she retired a couple of years ago. Cultured and well-mannered, brisk and energetic, she always looks tanned from riding her bike everywhere, and her healthy looking skin sets off her bright white hair. Today she wore a smart black coat, her usual knee-length wool skirt, and a vivid striped scarf. She got off her bike and shook my hand, welcoming me back to the village after my absence. “Vous habitez encore dans la rue Ville Vieille?” she asked. I nodded. “C’est bon,” she said, and smartly mounting her bike, whizzed off down the lane. The spirit of enthusiastic energy had come along to bless me and clear away the gloom of old woman number 1.

The choice of old age: to sink into despair, or to rise above it and stay active and positive. Is it a choice, or a matter of disposition? The Buddhists would say no matter our disposition, we still have a choice, and I agree. Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5yPh8trI9k

I am reading Secrets of the Flesh, Judith Thurman’s biography of Colette. Two great quotes emerged early on:

“When my body thinks…all my flesh has a soul.” Colette in Retreat from Love

And then this, in Thurman’s masterly introduction:

“A coherent personality aspires, like a work of art, to contain its conflicts without resolving them dogmatically.”

This is so well put, and is a key understanding in successful self-actualization. Or to put it another way, successful getting-along-with-oneself.

Combine this with the first quote and we have a recipe for individuation, for emotional and spiritual maturation, for acknowledgement of the wisdom of the body, and the parallel and intertwined wisdom of the psyche. Both body and psyche contain apparent contradictions that we often struggle to make sense of. Usually fruitlessly. (One of the most obvious being the spurious but nonetheless useful distinction between body and psyche, somewhat illusory while we are incarnated.)

The purposeful, loving acceptance of these contradictions brings us into harmony and well-being. Paradox is integral to life and to nature. Holding the paradox bravely and not slipping into the easy territory of black and white, is essential if we are to mature into genuinely loving beings, able to give ourselves to the world and take what it is we really need in return.

Hence the great power and endless appeal of the Trickster archetype. Life is indeed Lila, Divine Play — and yet it is also serious and must often be tackled head on. Everything is paradoxical at root. Nothing will ever make sense if we only take a rational point of view, and if we try, then some of our potential limbs of knowing will atrophy and drop off. As Thurman implies, it is by containing the contradictions, rather than forcing them into complicity, that we develop coherence.

A recent email conversation got me thinking again about the immense value of allowing oneself to completely fall apart at least once in one’s life. When we examine the lives of people who have made a real contribution to society we often find that they cracked at some point — they broke, couldn’t hold it together, had a psychosomatic illness that conveniently put them to bed for a few months, or a period of crying uncontrollably, or had to get away from everything and decided to walk across the Sahara or similar.

These are the lives we know about because biographies and autobiographies have been written, the crack-up has been recorded — but I think in each life there is a time and place for a breaking up of old ways of thinking, and while sometimes this can happen gracefully and gradually, more often than not it has to happen with a certain amount of difficulty because, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, we have to crack to let the light in.

It seems then that cracking up is an essential episode in most fully lived lives. You don’t get to cook as a person, to become interesting and authentic, without cracking up in some way, at some point. People who suppress this urge to break down, who hold it all together no matter what, often age quickly. Their psyche dulls, goes grey, and they lose their spark. It’s hard to relate to them and for them to relate fully and openly to others, because they have so much gunk and junk festering in their energy field.

If we can find a healthy way to break down and break all the crap up, a way in which we have just enough of the right kind of support, then we can be renewed and able to do things that stymied us before. We become ourselves in a deeper, more satisfying way. But cracking-up usually arises with deep fear, in the crackee and their loved ones, so that can mean hospitalisation and/or panic, which can be unnecessary and make matters worse. There is a distinction to be made between a healthy crack-up and a damaging one, but sometimes that distinction is not so easy to make.

I had a major crack-up when I was 33. I was confined to bed with a mystery illness that developed after travelling in Nepal and doing spiritual practice in the Himalaya. There’s a bigger story in that but for now I want to concentrate on the crack-up itself, not the apparent cause. I was deeply upset and utterly lost. I felt persecuted, completely uncertain, and cried all the time. I could not sleep but also was exhausted and had no physical energy at all. My nervous system collapsed and my body shook at the slightest provocation. I couldn’t watch television — it was too stimulating. I could read and I could write. That was it. So I wrote my way through it. (I have a dozen or so notebooks from that time, tucked away in a trunk. One day I’ll be ready to read them again.)

After this period, I was able to be creative in a way I had simply found impossible before. I had known since I was a small child that I wanted to write, but my excellent education and my own desire to be a good girl had paralysed my creativity. After the breakdown I was able to own the creative part of my nature and began to develop it consciously, going to art classes and writing workshops, and devoting myself to what I had previously considered to be an indulgence.

Perhaps if you grow up in an enlightened environment and have a really sensitive education you might be able to self-actualize without cracking up, but I had a lot of rigidity in my thinking from my schooling and social background. I also had a deep desire to live fully and to have an interesting and creative life, so all that rigidity just had to crack open first. In retrospect I feel deeply blessed by that experience, traumatic as it was at the time.

I was lucky. I had very good friends who trusted my process and supported me. No one ever suggested I was mentally ill, no one tried to get me into hospital. I was old enough and already had enough tools of introspection to be able to go crazy quietly and without damaging myself or anyone else.

I’ve been reading the biographies of 18th and 19th century women writers recently. There’s always a crack-up. And they went for it, smelling salts and tears and staying in bed for months. No anti-depressants and staving the whole thing off. No, they had the whole nine yards of emotional drama and release, and then afterwards always a new book, new poems — genuine creativity.

I don’t want to romanticise the Romantics, nor my own or anyone else’s crack-up, and I would wish the gentlest and kindest of falling-apart on my fellow beings. I am sure we can break down and crack up faster now, because we do everything faster, and with more awareness, because we have a century of psychology under our collective belt, but I do think that there are times in life when taking to one’s bed and letting go of functioning normally, even for a short while, is an urge stemming from a deep wisdom in the psyche, and that we do well to honour.