Tour Diary

Greetings Friends!

Upon returning from my last tour, I felt oddly disconnected when I got back to NYC. Yes it was my apartment – just as I had left it, yet it felt like a memory. Relationships with family, friends and everyone here felt distant as if they were a memory from a past life. I had been away almost 2 months and went from daily European trains, planes, automobiles and people 24/7 to – total silence! AHHHHH! 🙂

When I got back I thought – that’s it. I’m gonna be “the monk” of Jackson Heights. I meditated a lot and looked at the contents of my mind. I didn’t want to go back to the “old life” of running around NYC and the b.s. drama of people, family, and egoic pursuit of anything wearing high heels. The quiet and calm felt great and made me feel very in control.

I then had a good taste of the waters that demonstrate “life is not outside it’s inside”. It’s weirdly and beautifully true when you see without a doubt that you, we, I create our own reality.

We assemble pictures in our minds, an add meaning to them. Even if something out of control happens, we create our story and mental organization of what hits our eyes and ears and we are 100% responsible for the story we tell ourselves. (This is a tough one to swallow.)

I realized that many people don’t get the chance to have this quiet experience that I was having – to sit on top of some kind of peak (which felt a bit lonely) and able to look at life in this quiet, still way. I am not saying it was “deep” or even pleasurable. I am just saying it was quiet and clear(er).

I have no kids, no pressing drama, no madness that I am caught up in the way most people are. Most of my friends and family are caught up in the drama of work, the non stop noise of raising a family, psychotic behavior in their interpersonal relationships, the drama of debt, and so on.

To be honest, the quiet and spaciousness was delightful at times and very disconcerting at other times. I’d feel “now I am free and my spirit can now soar into the heavens”. This would be swiftly complimented with waves of lonliness and wanting to also “have a story”, have human interaction and contact. It was equal parts of pleasure and pain.

It’s a helluva lesson to see that everything is okay in one’s life and negative feelings can still bubble up. It’s the cure to blaming others and blaming circumstances. I had to take a look at this and had to admit that I am not done developing and learning.

The little jolts of pain and lonliness were not something though I just wanted to “squelch” and look away from, repress or escape from. “What is this quiet? What is this lonliness?” I thought. Then I’d see how just with my own thoughts I could change feelings. I could make lonliness vanish without actually having other people involved!

I saw one night that a state of “seeking and wanting” rather than a state of “having and loving” was my own responsibility and that the latter would be an attitude of joy, the former resulting in lonliness.

I noticed also – and amazingly – that all these sensations were all inside, and that I was 100% responsible for my reality. Thoughts and pictures led to emotions, and I get to choose the thoughts and pictures. (Another hard one to swallow.)

Unlike most people whose life feels like a runaway freight train of outer circumstances and blaming other people, I got to take a quiet peaceful and sometimes lonely look at the whole picture. It felt sober and healthy to wake up on some chilly sunny winter mornings by myself and simply “be”, and reduce my “thinking and spinning”.

At that point in my spiritual readings the passages about relationships being “the basis for our growth” started speaking to me and making sense. The next biggie to see is that others (YOU) and myself stem from the same source, and that we are truly “one” in nature and not separate. Thus, having others in my life just allows a deeper inquiry into who I am and why I am here. And, relationships with others will surely show me weak spots the fabric of my personality and psyche.

The joys of giving and receiving, the birth of new friendships, and the sometimes gritty dealings with family and close friends are something I am not done with just yet. I felt it was time to dive back in and saw that the perfect situations for spiritual growth can actually lie in everyday relationships.

Straight ahead! Until next time….

As a musician, returning from a tour can be tough. After nights of gigging, seeing new places, meeting new people, being the center of attention – to come back to the mundane existence of the same old neighborhood and dusty apartment can feel very dissapointing. It stirs up huge amounts of attachment to the “exciting parade” of touring, and aversion to my “boring life back home”.

As they say, it’s always darkest before the dawn. How true. Allow me to share the rays of today’s sunrise with you.

Whether it’s love one wants, or money, or security, or an object – the feeling of “being incomplete” until the object of desire or situation is acquired is itself the source of misery. How many of us walk around feeling incomplete all day long? Maybe your job is not good enough, the car, the house needs fixing, I want a new gadget, etc. It goes on endlessly until the madness is seen for what it is. Must we walk around feeling incomplete? We often do so automatically without inquiring into this feeling.

For about a two weeks an intense feeling of wanting has come over me due to the ending of a relationship. Being the spiritual seeker that I am, I decided to use this situation to look deeply into the nature and causes of my pain and suffering. It’s one thing to do it in the abstract – but to really apply knowledge and insight when the emotional rubber hits the road is quite the test!

By knowing the feeling of “not having” this person in my life, it follows logically that I know what it feels like to “have” her, right? Both feelings are accessible to me, right? If I know the pain of being without something, then I know the love of being with it, right? Could I somehow find harmony and oneness in this duality of having vs not having? Is there one big reality that contains both feelings? Can I discover the “coin” that these 2 sides belong to?

I started doing this inquiry on the plane ride home from Europe, and at the same time found myself contemplating how we were chasing daytime around the globe. I observed that it is always day, and it is always night somewhere on earth. There’s always part of the globe illuminated and part not. These 2 are linked, like yin & yang. One can think it is night yet it is day somewhere else, right? It’s not day or night – it’s both!

Aha! From an earthbound standpoint it either has to be day OR night – but stepping back to a more cosmic viewpoint, one sees it is equally both at all times. Could I see that feelings of having and not having are also aspects of one unified, non dual reality as well? Could I “go cosmic” in regards to my feelings of wanting versus having?

Much to my surprise, I easily called up the feeling of the “having” the love I yearned for – and let go of the lacking feelings for a brief moment. I fooled myself by asking if I could allow myself 30 seconds of relief to feel the “having feelings”. I felt it not as a memory, but a present moment feeling of “I have it now” – much like what is prescribed in visualization books. In an instant, I entered a whole new place through letting go of a lacking feeling.

Just think of all the things you have had in your life, toys as a child for example. You may no longer have them, but you might not feel that you need them to be complete now. You can feel that you have them even if you don’t, right? Can you see that the feeling of having is not necessarily based on the physical presence of an object? Like wise, you can have something and feel that you don’t have. Look at the person with the 5 million dollar house who wants a 20 million dollar house – they feel they don’t “have”. Crazy but true.

For example – I feel that I have my beloved Grandmother in my heart, with no longing to have here on this plane. The same for the beloved pets I have had. They are with me, and I feel that I have them despite their not being here. On the flip side, I have been on international tours and still held onto the feeling of “I need to get more gigs”. Crazy but true.

Can you see now that the sensations of having and not-having are ONLY feelings? I repeat – crazy but true. But sane to investigate this! 🙂

Lester Levenson laid it out simply. Want equals lack. Give up the lack feelings, and have it all. Simple and profound.

A shift in my viewpoint started a deep sense of “everything is ok”, “it is all given”, and peace emerged. Things still are what they are, but the feelings of “I’m incomplete” and “I want” transformed into “It’s all ok” and “I am at peace”. A shift in perception! Now that’s a true miracle.

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Here’s a little illustration you might enjoy:

“Christmas is coming and it’s time to get a tree. A feeling of incompleteness settles because we want but don’t have a tree. It’s urgent and necessary – we gotta have a tree. We get the tree and have to decorate it. More wanting, we gotta do it and won’t feel complete until we do. We do it, and sit back and ahhh…we feel complete for a little while. A week later – hey the tree is getting old, we gotta take it down. We gotta put all the ornaments away and sweep and dispose of the tree properly – more wanting. We’re incomplete until we do so. We do it and feel complete again now that the house is all cleaned up.”

Ok – nothing wrong with a Christmas tree, of course! But what I am looking at is the thread of “incompleteness” sewn through the experience and the relatively few moments of feeling complete woven through this whole scenario. Isn’t the feeling of completeness accessible to us more than this? I think so.

This example is just a microcosm of how we live life. I know there is a happier way. The feeling of completeness is always accessible to us, just the same way silence sits behind noise, waiting patiently.

Happy Holidays! I hope Santa brings you everything you want 🙂