You may or may not have noticed that I have not written as much for Rebel Zen of late as I used to. There is a twofold explanation for this:

1) Lack of time – not a lot I can do about this at the moment; gotta put food on the table.

2) Negative frame of mind – basically, I am a musician who also writes personal development stuff, and over the years of I have noticed a roller-coaster shaped trend to my personal development content output based on my reoccurring and longish cycles of depression.

Basically when I am feeling groovy, I write lots of personal development stuff, but when I am going through a prolonged “dark night of the soul” my armchair-Zen-style blatherings tend to dry up (which is very inconvenient because it is quite a lucrative writing market for me when I have good momentum going).

Zen and the Art of Being Miserable?

When I am dark, I find it easy to keep writing music, because these are works of art that feel fully at home with states of mind of like depression, anxiety and paranoia. After all where would some of my favourite musicians like Nick Cave, Pink Floyd or Morrissey be without their “black dogs”?

But it would be hypocritical of me to write about meditation, enlightenment and success ideas when I am failing to practice what I preach. Besides, it’s impossible, I can only write from the heart.

So, suffice to say, I have been in one of these stretches of feeling down for all of this Australian winter, which happened last winter too. By “feeling down” I mean depressed moods, hopelessness, anxiety, paranoia and fear.  The question is – why?

SAD … and Other Suspects

Well, this is complex, but through trial and error I have found that alcohol doesn’t help, so cutting right back on that makes a big difference. Also I have been mighty, mighty tired for the last couple of years, which is par for the parenting course, but nonetheless, no doubt aggravates the problem.

Further, the fact that I have been lately afflicted during winter leads one to suspect a case of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). And, let’s face it, with my extended, outrageous youth not that far behind me and my remaining taste for the occasional toke of the old University Cigarette (if one should happen to be passed around), I may have simply screwed my nerves up for sake of experimentation and kicks.

Anyway, causes aside, being male, all I really care about is “how can I fix this quickly, cheaply and without having to talk to anyone about it?”, so I was quite chuffed when “The Universe” or (insert preferred deity here) sent me some unexpected help in the form of a book by Brenda Shoshanna called “Fearless: The 7 Principles of Peace of Mind.

I read this book while at my worst point in my mid-winter blues, where my anxiety and paranoia was so bad as to be almost quite silly. Cars would drive up our quite street at night while I was trying to sleep and I would feel startled, worrying that “they” were coming to get me. Crazy stuff like that; quite absurd really, but nonetheless disconcerting.

A West-Meets-East Zen Approach

Well this book, Fearless, is all about how to combat these feelings, with just the kind of West-Meets-East Zen approach that I love, so it really hit the spot.

It helped me at night (when my anxiety was at its worst) to lie in bed before sleeping and go over the book. Chapters like “Recognising the Voices Within” and “Meeting Fear Face-to-Face” really helped me to work through things quietly on my own.

I guess the main points of the book were not new to me, being an old self-help/Zen-waffle junkie from way back, but it is always great to be reminded of the core ideas of Eastern philosophy and how they really are very liberating.

After all, unless you’re on a ship that is actually sinking or you are literally being physically attacked right now or something horrible like that, the rest of our fear and anxiety is an imagined load of old cobblers – fantasies with little-to-no basis in reality (reality being NOW).

I could go on forever, but let me rest by saying that if you have any problems with fearfulness, anxiety and/or paranoia then I highly recommend that you get your hands on Fearless: The 7 Principles of Peace of Mind as soon as possible because it may help you as much as it helped me to feel better.

(By the way, I am generally feeling much better thanks, I have kept the booze to a minimum, boring as that may be, and the days down-under are getting longer, and while I am not on any kind of high, things certainly don’t seem as bleak to me as they did a month or two ago. And soon – the spring!)

Continued from Part One

Everything Is Appropriate

The above three words were scribbled on a whiteboard in the office of Feedwell Café.

Feedwell, now closed down, was a famous, old, ramshackle vegetarian joint in the hipster suburb of Prahran in Melbourne, Australia. It was the spring of 1998. I had been working in the cafe for a week, squeezing vege juices for hungover groovers and health conscious yuppies.

Next to the words was a very crude drawing of five or six interlinking lines that basically looked a branch of a tree.

“What’s that all about?” I asked Alan, the cafe owner.

Alan was a tall, thin, white-haired fellow in his 70s who, I was vaguely aware, was into ‘all that New Age stuff” as I would have put it at the time.

He was definitely a dude – for example he chose his staff by holding a crystal pendulum over their resumes (apparently mine caused the pendulum to spin in the affirmative direction, something that, later, probably caused him to wonder if his crystal needed replacing).

“It’s true” Alan replied “Everything is Appropriate”

There came a choking noise from the corner of the messy office-cum-lunch room. It was Sashaan, the punk-haired chef who I also had pigeon holed as a “New Ager” simply because she had a “Magick Happens” sticker on her car.

“Wouldn’t be very appropriate if somebody ran in here with an axe and starting chopping heads off now would it?” She grumbled, her mouth full of lunch.

“It would actually,” said Alan. He spoke with a calm that was, in those days, foriegn to me. “Like I said … on a Universal level everything is appropriate.” With this he shuffled off, so tall he had to bow his head to walk through the doorway.

Sashaan didn’t say anything, she just rolled her eyes which were twinkling like she was enjoying a joke that I wasn’t in on. I didn’t know what to think, my mind was blown, but I suddenly felt a strong desire to know more.

For example, what were all those squiggly lines about?

And how could Alan be so sure of his rather brave proposition?

My mind was naturally open enough not to be offended by the statement, but I was pretty sure that a lot of people would be outraged by this kind of talk.

But what if Alan was in fact right? What would that mean and how would that affect my life?

The Five Year Hangover

All of this was set against the backdrop of the unraveling of my life.

I refer to the period from when I was about 22 years to about 27 years old as the “Hangover Years”. Not just because I woke up every day with one, but because from high school to 22 years old, life had been one fantastic trip, a joyous, invincible journey of discovery and fun. I was in a band that was hugely popular in my hometown and was fairly convinced that I was some kind of new God sent to bless the Earth with my presence and talent. I was basically living out a wonderful, ego-movie in which I was the headlining star.

But then, suddenly, it turned to shit.

I found myself alienated from my loved ones. Broke. My local fame had failed to spread and mature into any kind of a sustainable career (entirely my own fault – I know now – but at the time it all seemed very unfair and tragic). I was hooked on alcohol, cigarettes and weed.

Nice one.

So I did the logical thing, I ran away to another city to start all over again, which is how I found myself at Feedwell Café.

While on the one hand, I was having a blast meeting new people and playing in a new band, I was a little disconcerted to discover that not only did my problems follow me over to Melbourne, but they were getting worse and I was getting more and more depressed.

I had no idea how to deal with this other than to keep moving, keep working, keep joking, keep drinking, smoking, tripping, shagging.

I was a mess.

So, desperate to change for the better and inspired by the calm of people like Alan and Sashaan (who despite her healthy cynicism, was a very enlightened soul) I began to investigate a very different kind of ‘spirituality’ to the Christian dogma I had been brought up with. Always a big reader, I began by devouring Buddhist and New Age books, and thus began my fumbling start along the journey to Do-It-Yourself Enlightenment.

This journey would take me into the realms of not only Buddhist and New Age concepts, but Contemporary Western Meditation, Zen, Taoism, QiGong, I Ching, Yoga, Tarot, Naturopathy, Psychedelic Meditation, Traditional Chinese Medicine, New Thought, and much more.

All of the above brought me greatly increased inner peace, health and happiness, but there was still a lingering unease, a nagging fear that I just couldn’t put my finger on, an unease that kept me awake at nights … all until a certain flight from Malaysia to Europe that is …

Continued in Part Three.

I wrote about this ages ago here. Basically sums up my philosophy of life.

Mystery makes the world go around. The only reason you are reading this article, and not checking your facebook or twitter profiles is that you don’t know how it is going to end. When things get predictable people tend to lose interest and look elsewhere.

When you get down to the fine detail and study life closely, Mystery is the animating force of the world, the reason why every man and woman gets up in the morning, has breakfast and steps out into the wild crazy world.

The search for meaning and answers behind the events of your life is fueled by your innate curiosity. Curiosity is a force so powerful that it sets the direction of our civilization and species, fills the wallets of gossip magazine publishers and drives people to continue to search for answers against great odds.

You only need to look at prime time TV, with its wall-to-wall crime shows and detective dramas to see the popularity of people searching for the unknown. Do people like the blood, the gore, the tales of tragedy? Some do perhaps, but most glue their eyeballs to the screen 4 nights a week because they are addicted to the idea of mystery.

The Seeker

Most spiritual and personal development seekers start out on journeys of self improvement and inner reflection with the best intentions, looking for truth and insight wherever it appears to be available.

It soon becomes apparent that there is a huge amount of people willing to share their answers with you. Some will give them to you for free, other want you to buy it from them, and of course there are others that will give you their version in exchange for the sane, rational part of your brain. There are simple answers, complex answers, mantras that explain the universe in a single Sanskrit sentence, through to multi-layered pantheons and metaphysical systems.

Some people will get sick of the searching, and go for a “quick fix, one answer fits all” approach to life, which could take the form of joining an organized religion, buying the full $30,000 training package from the personal development guru or becoming a strict and unwavering atheist.

Others will become disillusioned with the search altogether and fall back into old patterns, exchanging the path of awakening for a lifetime of being asleep. For them the seeking is a painful experience, something that must be accomplished or they have somehow failed. They are always looking for that missing part of themselves out there in the world.

Some people think that once you become enlightened, suddenly the answers to all of the questions of the universe are revealed. The true wisdom (or at least my version of it) is in fact the exact opposite. It is the idea that the truth may never be found, but it is in the seeking and searching where the realities of life, the universe and the contents of your inner world become visible.

I tend to search and read and meditate without the need to lock down a certain fact as being true. Once you get to the stage where the answers are no longer important, the search becomes pure joy, it is truly the stuff of being alive. You embrace the fact that you don’t know everything, and will never know everything. There is always another perspective to every situation.

A lot of the things that I once considered true have revealed themselves in my life to be false, and vice versa, so that I can safely assume that any of my beliefs could be thrown on their heads in the very next instance.

OPEN AND AWARE MIND

An open but aware mind is the key. With a developed skill of discernment you can separate the wheat from the chaff (or use another less polite euphemism) and take every “answer” and truth provided to you with a grain of salt, knowing that only via the power of direct experience should you take anything for a truth.

By living this way you can use the perpetual mystery to propel you through life. To always seek new experiences and adventures, to truly experience an enlightened state by seeing everything in the world through fresh eyes, like that of a new born child. Once you realize that every experience in life is unique, and that most of your truths are really just preconditioned assumptions then the everydayness of your life takes on a life of its own.

You are not searching for something outside yourself to complete something that is missing, but marveling at the strange place we call our lives, with all its hidden subtleties and whack-you-over-the-head realities.

By keeping your sense of mystery and wonder at the universe, you continue to feel alive inside.

The answers are the boring part; it’s the journey that is the thing of value. The journey to understanding and wisdom is the thing that can’t be bottled, packaged or put into a 10 stage seminar program. That is the true gold of the eternal quest of the spiritual seeker.

Arm Rests. Adjustable ones. The key to happiness is being able to notice that things like this exist. Allow me to elaborate…

When things get wacky (difficult, painful), the hardest thing to do is to see the woods for the trees. Let me begin with an example – the common occurrence of a friend’s advice to a lovesick mate:

“It will be okay; either you’ll break up with your boy/girlfriend or you’ll work your problems through and stay together. Either way you’ll be fine and it will all be for the best.”

An answer to which our lovesick puppy will categorically fail to relate to until later, when he will see that it was absolute truth all along. Until then the problem will seem tragic, unbearable, and probably life-threatening.

Meanwhile it’s comically easy for the friend of our love-sick puppy to see the solution to the problem. Puppy just needs to be himself, do his best, and wait. That’s it. End of story.

But onward, holistic soldiers, to the arm-rest thing, and the promised ‘key to happiness’ I know you are breathlessly waiting for …

Oh, the Pain! The Pain!

Both at work and here in my home office I have been struggling for a while trying to get comfortable in front of my computers. I have tried sitting up straight for hours on end, relaxing back like a slob, stretching every few minutes, sitting on cushions, adjusting the monitor height, adjusting the chair height (at work anyway, my home chair is stuffed). I tried acupuncture, massage, and yoga. Nothing helped. I have been constantly uncomfortable, always suffering pain. In fact, I experience more back, shoulder and arm pain now working at a desk than I did all my long years working in…

…the Hostility Industry

Sorry, *coughs*, I meant ‘hospitality’, of course.

I used to come home from ten hour bar tending/dish washing/table waiting shifts rubbing my shoulders and groaning that I wanted a desk job because I assumed that all the bending and lifting, and thumping and flexing, and go, go, go was causing stress and strain and was directly responsible for my gargantuan shoulder pain.

Hello! It was just the opposite! One month after I stopped pounding the cafe boards I started experiencing a whole new world of distress and pain. Needless to say, movement is extremely important to our overall well-being and we should never forget this, my information dazzled, overly cerebral friends.

Anyway, yesterday, I suddenly had a blinding flash of inspiration. The reason for my pain was not my posture per se but the fact that the stupid arm-rests were forcing my elbows and shoulders skywards – an unnatural position and obviously the cause of my agony. Being a talkative chap in a talkative office I exclaimed ‘Eureka!’ and announced my discovery and my newfound life-mission to solve the problem. “I will make my fortune being the guy who solved the Great Arm-Rest Debacle!” I cockily predicted.

“Dude, too late”, said Karen, the sharp-as-a-tack young lady to my left. “The arm-rests are adjustable.”

And so they were.

Like, Duh.

One click of a button and the problem was solved, my shoulders dropped and I noticed an immediate increase in postural comfort. Then this morning I sat down here at home and discovered that the same applies for my salvaged-from-the-side-of-the-road home office chair. As mentioned, the seat height doesn’t adjust up and down properly, but the arms adjust as freely and carelessly as a wind-sock in an indecisive breeze.

Cripes! Wake up brain! Such an easy answer to a couple of year’s worth of pain and frustration. But how do we train ourselves to see the easy answers that stare us in the face? To see the clever idea that will easily make good? To separate the wheat from the chafe? To best deal with pain and stress?

Well, it’s easier said than done, but I believe it’s best to take Love Sick Puppy’s friend’s advice and just be ourselves, do our best, and wait.

Ask questions; meditate; allow things to work themselves out.

Even when we are ‘losing it’, we do well to recognise this fact and just go with it. It would probably be more damaging to hold it all in and act like a stoic. Energy needs to flow, so if it’s time to freak out, then freak out already. The sooner you release your negativity, the sooner you’ll be smiling again.

And, not least, persist. If after all the cushions, and stretching and fifty-dollar-an-hour treatments I’d given in to the pain and never put my mind to the problem again, then I never would have had the pleasure of, if belatedly, discovering the tactical solution to the Great Arm-rest Debacle.

P.S. By the way, the fact that we are all already enlightened is a bit like the fact that I had adjustable arm rests: the solution was already there – I just didn’t know it yet. Same goes for your inherent enlightenment: it’s there already, it’s just a matter of getting touch with what that feels like.