by jeff brown
I kept my eyes closed and remembered a series of uncomfortable events, moments of great reactivity and anger. With my awareness, I went looking for her in there—not the warrior her, but the frightened her, the vulnerable her, the tender Sarah doing her best to manage an overwhelming situation. I stayed with the memories until she appeared in my mind’s eye, sitting outside my house after yet another conflict, shaking like a leaf. I saw her eyes overcome with fear. I felt her heart racing. I could hear her planning her getaway. In that moment, she was all of five years old, a vulnerable little girl, with tangled hair and a tear-streaked face, fleeing to her tree fortress with lightning in her feet, trying to escape familial madness.
I wept for her as I walked home. Interestingly, I had never been able to cry for her before. I could cry about her, but not for her. I was too wounded to focus on her own internal experience. But, at this moment, something was changing. Now I could hold her within the heart of compassion. Now I could see her vulnerability through empathic eyes. Now I could see the tender little girl beneath, longing to be healed. Yes, she had done her very best, too.
I stopped to brush the snow off a bench in the market and sat down. I remembered what Sarah had said to me after the betrayal:”It was a suicidal act. I just had to kill it. I can’t hold this much love in my heart.” Back then it sounded like bullshit, but now I felt the true weight of those words. I recognized that it was the truth. It was too much to handle. With a love that vastly exceeded the level of development we were presently at, the love had no safe ground. One way or another, it had to topple.
For the first time, I had no energetic charge around how she killed it. Through compassionate eyes, I understood she needed to do something so cutting and final that there was no way back. We needed a harsh event to end our impossible dream. In a strange way, the harshness of the reaction was directly proportionate to the depth of connection. Truth be told, had it been any gentler, I would probably have continued to chase Lightnin’ Foot forever.
That night, I went for dinner with Daniel and his fiancée, Vanessa. Ironically, I was alone, and he was now partnered, having met his beloved on a bird-watching expedition in Costa Rica. No, they weren’t watching cardinals, but they were brought together by synchronicity of a divine order. She had missed a charter flight back to Toronto and had to wait another week for the next one. While hanging around in San Jose, she bumped into an old friend who had flown down for the bird watching tour. Turns out she had an extra ticket to it because her sister had contracted mononucleosis and couldn’t come. Daniel and Vanessa met the first morning of the tour and hadn’t left each other’s sides since. Isn’t the universe funky.
While we were eating, Daniel described a forgiveness ritual that he had performed four years earlier, when he was ready to forgive Hannah for leaving him. He had flown to the beach where she had died. He wrote Hannah a long, honest letter of forgiveness. Then he released it to the same ocean that had taken her life, while saying a prayerful goodbye. He said it made a world of difference.
The following morning, I woke up with forgiveness in my heart—there was something I had yet to express. I got in the car and drove to the cave of remembered dreams. When I arrived, I found a giant ice chunk blocking the entrance. It seemed like it had been put there deliberately. Someone had either been there and left, or someone was still inside. I shouted “Helloooo,” half expecting the abominable snowman to appear, but there was no response. I banged my fist against the cliff wall. Again, no response. So I moved the chunk off to the side, and climbed on in.
Everything looked as it had before, except there were ashy remnants of a small fire and a heart carefully drawn around my graffiti scrawl: Love It Forward. Looked like fresh chalk. New lovers had evidently found the cave.
I sat down and closed my eyes, quickly flooded with memories of our time together. The profound lovemaking. Tenderly holding her, nestled tightly together. As I remembered, I felt the hot tears of release begin to flow again. I also felt my hand become warm, as if aglow. It was as if Sarah was sitting right there beside me, holding it. Perhaps, somehow she was.
I opened my eyes and said that which had eluded me for more than thirteen years:
Sarah,
I forgive you for your actions.
I forgive you for the way you left.
I forgive you.
And I meant it.
I drove back with a feeling of levity in my heart. It was like an ancient stone had been lifted from my soul. I had finally arrived at a genuine and authentic forgiveness. Wondrous.
When I arrived home, I finished the chapter by writing a section on the process of forgiveness. Not the artificial, premature forgiveness that many of us know well, but the real thing—the kind that arrives only after a genuine healing process has come to an end. And, amazingly, even though Sarah and I were long gone from one another’s lives, I had the vague sense that our connection was still being repaired and re-stitched on some unseen level.
Sometimes people walk away from love because it is
so beautiful that it terrifies them. Sometimes they
leave because the connection shines a bright light
on their dark places and they are not ready to work
them through. Sometimes they run away because
they are not developmentally prepared to merge with
another—they have more individuation work to do
first. Sometimes they take off because love is not
a priority in their lives—they have another path and
purpose to walk first. Sometimes they end it because
they prefer a relationship that is more practical
than conscious, one that does not threaten the ways
that they organize reality. Because so many of
us carry shame, we have a tendency to personalize
love’s leavings, triggered by the rejection and feelings
of abandonment. But this is not always true.
Sometimes it has nothing to do with us. Sometimes
the one who leaves is just not ready to hold it safe.
Sometimes they know something we don’t—they know
their limits at that moment in time. Real love is no
easy path: Readiness is everything. May we grieve
loss without personalizing it. May we learn to love
ourselves in the absence of the lover.
Gratitude
I felt so profoundly propelled to the creative process, day after day, that I stopped caring what others thought about the condition of my apartment. The entire book was being written on its walls, just as my dream had foretold. As soon as one room was covered, I moved on to the next. It was a messy, magnificent spiritual practice, and a deep letting go of self-consciousness around how things look to others, in service of something true. Chaotic magnificence indeed.
Everything in me was transforming again. How beautiful, I didn’t even need to be in a relationship for that to happen. It was happening through the creative process itself, as writing about love was somehow calling me higher, re-shaping me in the cosmic kiln. It was that powerful. My life was sparkling with sacred purpose.
As I approached the end of the writing, I felt the beloved hovering near. She was the hand I wrote with, the lens I looked through, the ankle-tackling kitty that tripped me up the stairs. Despite the distance between us, I somehow experienced myself in connected terms, united with my beloved, seemingly absent but always close at heart.
At the same time, I had finally become my own vessel and harbor. Instead of looking for meaning beyond myself, I found it right here, in the bones of my being. I was the sail that gathered the wind and I was the shore I landed upon. Perhaps this was the ultimate gift of the connection—the gift of my own encapsulated presence. After your beloved is gone, all efforts to find her outside yourself fail. You have only one choice: to find the divine deep within, to partner with yourself, to find God manifest as you.
And then I wrote:
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It’s so beautiful what happens when we define
relationship success solely in terms of whether we
have learned from it, expanded from it, grown to the
next stage on our spiritual journey. When we move
from this perspective, relationship becomes
a wonderful depth-charge for our own healing
and expansion. If we find a lifelong partnergreat!—
but if we don’t, we get better
at partnering with our inner lover.
In a way, it had all come down to choices. There is this moment, after a beloved has left, when you have to decide. Do you close your heart to life, or do you feed the fires of deep feeling? Do you get lost in your memories, or convert them into new possibilities? Do you go blind to love, or do you see it everywhere? It helps to realize that love is always a blessed visitor. We have no guarantee it will come our way. Even a moment of it is a great gift from Grace. Better we build on our blessings...
Love is a series of risings and fallings. We fall
down, we get up. We get up, we fall down. We
either see love’s trip-ups as examples of our own
victimhood—we are being abused by the universe—or
as opportunities for self-creation, embracing love’s
challenges as essential lessons from the Godself
within. The gift of falling down—there’s gold in them
there spills. Stumbling towards ecstasy.
Years ago, in the devastation of our separation, I had the thought: Perhaps this is why it’s so very difficult to lose a soulmate. You don’t just lose your companion. You don’t just lose your friend. You don’t just lose your lover. You lose your portal to divinity. You lose your gateway to God. You lose the whole bloody universe.
I picked up my marker and scribbled it on my spiritual graffiti wall, like a man on a mission. There was something in that quote waiting to be unveiled...
Perhaps this is why it’s so very
difficult to lose a soulmate.
You don’t just lose your companion.
You don’t just lose your friend.
You don’t just lose your lover.
You lose your portal to divinity.
You lose your gateway to God.
You lose the whole bloody universe.
For weeks, I leaned into those wall-words, rolling them around in my heart...You lose your portal to divinity...You lose your gateway to God... You lose the whole bloody universe...
You lose, you lose, you lose.... and then, what?... What?
One night, it came clear. I was roused from my sleep in the midst of the night, the moon shining bright and full.
And I wrote the perfect proviso:
And then you find it again.
In your heartbreak.
In your healing.
In the learning of the lessons that expand you.
In the strengthening and rebirth of your willingness.
In the claiming of your own inner beloved.
Every path is a journey to God.
We just have to remember to open
our heart again and again...
With that hearticulation, I knew my story was truly complete. I had shared what I needed to share. I had made my peace. A sense of relief flooded me, as I felt into the completion of this writing journey. And it was more than the writing. It was also the end of a paradigm that had begun when I first saw Sarah in Boulder. So much time had passed since then, so many new Lowens had been birthed. I was simply not the same being any longer. My soul had been rewoven with love as its thread. The relationship had been the perfect laboratory for my own expansion.
After falling into a perfect two hour meditation, I walked downstairs and went outside. The first morning light was just shining in, enveloping me in hopefulness. It reminded me of my own inner process. Slowly, the darkness had receded. Gradually, things had become clear again. It’s amazing how many stages there are to love’s mendings.
I walked over to Bellevue Square and sat down on a park bench, celebrating in silence. Waves of gratitude moved through me, as I honored my achievement. Sarah’s face entered my consciousness. I looked at her in my mind’s eye, while my heart filled to the brim with love. Such grace. I felt oddly closer to her than ever before. A wave of wonderment moved through me, marveling at the ways that the divine had converted my tragedy into transformation. The gold in the dross. From chaotic suffering into chaotic magnificence. How Great Thou Art.
I took one of the deepest breaths I have ever taken and these words came pouring out of my mouth:
Oh Sarah, thank you. THANK YOU.
It was all a gift.
ALL of it.
And I have loved us forward.
23
Signs and Signings
I wrote Wholemates: Relationship as a Portal to the Divine over a two-year period. It was quite the project to archive my walls of heartspeak into book form. After many edits, I finally transmuted it into a tangible document, ready for publish.
As often happens when walking your true-path, the energy of the writing had its own natural momentum. Rather than hunting around for an agent, I decided to send it to two publishers whose work I valued. Within six weeks, both responded with offers. I chose the publisher with the smallest advance. They were kind and ethical, and I wanted someone kind to publish my work.
While waiting for the book to come out, I worked hard in my mediation practice in an effort to save money for a three-month sabbatical. I had agreed in the book contract to do a 29-city signing tour throughout north America, to begin the following autumn. I had no idea what to expect, but looked forward to the adventure. In my personal life, I continued on my separate trajectory—not dating, not looking for love. I had tried it all, and nothing satisfied me like the beloved. Another may come, but I doubted she would come if I went looking.
IOD
Shortly before going on tour, I went looking for Dude to sit with. I missed his dear presence. I looked everywhere and finally found him sitting in front of the Asian dry cleaner that I used for my suits. Apparently he was waiting to get his Hawaiian shirts pressed.
“How you dudin’, Dude?”
“Waiting on the Chinaman. He’s always late with my stuff.”
You had to love the dignity of this houseless man, always making sure he made an elegant appearance.
“How are things?” I inquired.
“Good. You looking for some wisdoms? Because my price has gone up.”
Then he reached for a white plastic sign in his bag and showed it to me. In bold purple ink, it read:
$5 Dollars per Dudism.
No deferral plan.
Pay or adios.
Dude was getting bold.
“Got tired of promises to pay. What do they think I am—the Toronto Dudeminion bank? no, no way. It’s not like I am charging a fortune. I mean, I give them the goods for a pittance. And they can take my wisdom all the way to the karmic bank and cash in. I can’t tell you how many IODs I’ve written that never got paid.”
“IOD, isn’t that a contraceptive device?”
“Not an IUD, idiot! An IOD: I Owe Dude. I mean, they pay for all that detachment drivel. How many times do I have to tell all of you? Detachment’s just a silly tool. It’s not a life, people! At least my Dudisms actually keep people in their bodies!”
Clearly it wasn’t the right moment to sit peacefully with Dude. I got up to leave, but not before handing him a $50 bill.
“What’s this for?” he inquired.
“For ten people who didn’t pay their IODs,” I replied.
He looked a little stunned, then slowly grinned.
“Hey, now I can pay the Chinaman. Sit back down. I owe you some Dudisms.”
I didn’t want any Dudisms right now. I felt at peace. I shook my head no, thanks.
As I crossed the street, he shouted after me: “Well, at least YOU have gratitude in your attitude. You are living proof that m
y wisdom works, lover boy!”
And so I am. My pushcart guru had made all the difference.
The Scent of the Beloved
The book tour was grueling—29 cities in 45 days. Publishers want to get their money’s worth. Intensifying my discomfort was a driver who never stopped talking, despite my request that he relax and breathe on numerous occasions. He talked so effusively that we missed the correct highway exit on four different occasions. Eventually, I surrendered to the wave of words, trying to catch some shut-eye between paragraphs.
The rigors of the tour reminded me that I am not as physically vital as I once was, something that I’d failed to notice in my habitual life. I was now 50—it had been more than 14 years since Sarah and I said goodbye—and my aching back and strained eyes reminded me of my limitations time and again.
Making things more difficult were some of the interactions I had at the signings. They were often triggered by the same question, usually asked right after I read the sections in the book that celebrated the path of the beloved as a spiritual practice. A woman’s hand would shoot up from the audience and she’d ask whether I was currently in a relationship. I always answered the same way, “My heart is always ready for the beloved.”
She or someone else in the crowd would then express cynicism about my claiming to understand so much about soulmates without being in a successful partnership. It was always an uncomfortable dialogue. People don’t understand that the greatest loves of all are often the hardest to hold together in this mad world. But, still, the question nagged at me, as it illuminated the strangeness of my path. I was talking about great love without a single prospect in sight.
Before the final leg of the tour, I took a few days to myself at Rockwood Hot Springs, the place where I had first started the healing process, in the smoldering aftermath of the relationship. Being at Rockwood seemed to bring the beloved close again. One morning, I was sure that I smelled Sarah’s sublime scent on the wind. That night, I dreamed of a love that was never truly gone, as we communed with great spirit in the halls of eternal reflection. I was never alone. The beloved was everywhere...
