Heaven (2019)
A good morning is one where Eva wakes up a short time after me, so I am able to cuddle her before getting up. As I spoon her I sense my energy shift. I soften, breathe more deeply and inhale her fragrance. This is how I love to start my day, being reminded of my love for this woman I have known for 40 years. There is always a sexual buzz between us; I involuntarily groan a little as she pushes back into my groin.
The hug ends when one of us is stirred enough to get up and make tea for both of us. Whoever has made the trek downstairs and back comes into the room and is greeted with a fabulous smile. Eva’s face lights up whenever she sees me. Even after all this time I am still not used to experiencing these looks of love. I spent the first 30 odd years of my life with rejecting women, so this is new territory for me. I doubt I’ll ever cease to be amazed and enchanted by that look and her smile.
Eventually my energy demands that I make a start on the day. After a short breakfast I’ll be outside repairing something or planting something or checking that the chickens have all they need. Or maybe I take down a tree in the hedge and start sawing it up into logs. During the winter I need to stack several tons of firewood for use in the future. I love all that I do – and it shows. I have fresh vegetables from the garden all the year round; usually more than we can eat. I also grow most of our fruit and store large quantities in the freezer for use over the winter. We keep chickens for eggs and meat, raising our own chicks. I love the sense of connection to nature that I experience, it satisfies me in a way that I didn’t know was possible.
At 11 o’clock I am back indoors and sitting talking to Eva whilst having our ‘elevenses’. We love talking together and are never at a loss as to what to say. Sometimes we discuss one of our intellectual projects; Eva is writing a couple of books and I periodically write papers reviewing a topic for a colleague or friend. Sometimes we will ‘banter’ about one of our trips. Eva might tell me I’m looking like an Edwardian school teacher or I’ll call her a deaf old git because she hasn’t put her hearing aid in. If Eva is having a bad hair day I might say “Good morning Camilla”; but when she looks stunning, which is far more usual, I’ll tell her how beautiful she is. The comments are all real, but said with such affection that it is difficult to be upset by them. But I know to get my haircut after I’ve been a school teacher for a day or two, and Eva will use her hearing aids when she is in a period when her hearing is particularly bad. We love this banter and usually both end up laughing uproariously.
We are retired, which means that we can spend as much time as we like doing whatever we choose to do. We like having visits from friends and family, but the very best times are when we are home together, just the two of us. We will hug and kiss dozens of times a day. But the highlight is always the deep contact that we can access when we are relaxing together. I adore looking into Eva’s eyes; I see her, the being who inhabits her lovely body. As we hold eye contact we smile and then one of us, usually me, starts to have tears in our eyes – which pretty quickly leads to both of us crying with love and gratitude. As this contact develops Eva starts to shine: she says the same thing happens to me. As she shines her face transforms, she looks like this adorably pretty 17 year old who adores me! I am not exaggerating; this is literally what I see. I find her irresistible and lose my normal sense of myself. I am lost in a state of total Love. After a few minutes the intensity of this state becomes too much for one of us and we laugh, and break the contact. But we still feel incredibly close, in a sense of profound intimate union with each other.
We are shy of allowing this to happen much when we are around other people, but when we do they always notice and love what they see. Indeed it was the feedback from people who witnessed the profound love between us that awoke us to where our relationship had landed. We started to receive positive feedback when we went to festivals and parties; complete strangers would come up to us and say how inspired they were by seeing the love between us.
Recently, in 2016, we were on holiday in Ibiza. Eva was looking forward to us going clubbing one evening; an opportunity for her to dress up and show off. She also really loves dancing with me. However I had an upset stomach and felt too unwell to even contemplate staying up late or taking ecstasy. I found it hard to disappoint Eva, but I cared more about taking care of my health. When we talked at length about it we decided that we could aim for second best by going to a beach bar and dancing together there. We went with three other friends. After a good meal we made our way down to the dance area close to the beach that was overlooked by the restaurant. We then started to rearrange the seating so the five of us could sit together. A waitress came and remonstrated with us but accepted that we would put everything back before we left. A while later the same waitress told me off for venturing too close to the edge of the area where there was a steep drop down to a rocky beach. We were starting to feel unwelcome by being told off so frequently.
Despite all this Eva and I started to dance together. From time to time I had to stop, I was still not feeling 100%, and complained bitterly to my friends about the frailty that was progressively curtailing me as I aged. A couple of times while I was sitting down Eva came over and did a sexy dance in front of me, which had the effect of stirring me from the cushion and joining her bopping to the music. Several times we were lost gazing at each other, smooching and gently swaying together. After a few hours we all decided that it was time to go. We remembered to put the seating back as we had found it and started to make our way back through the restaurant toward the car. As we passed a group of men one of them stopped us and said “I want you to know that I found the love between you two inspiring. It was really beautiful to see. Thank you!” Another person asked how long we had been together and when we said 37 years he said “Amazing, I thought you might be new lovers!”. We continued through the restaurant and a different waitress came up and thanked us for the beautiful energy that we had brought to the place that evening. She was beaming with delight as were most of the guests overlooking the dance area.
Part of the shock for them, as for the people at festivals and parties, was that we were clearly in our late 60’s or 70’s. Everyone has seen young teenagers besotted with each other and glowing as they look at each other. But two old age pensioners doing the same after being together for more than 40 years is something else! Another part of the surprise was that we clearly still had a very active sex life – and were up with flirting with people twenty years our junior.
About twice a week Eva and I will decide that we will have a private party together. We have a nice meal and then dress up for each other and have a really good time that includes having sex together. We are both highly sexed and have always enjoyed good sex together. However nothing prepared either of us for how intense and pleasurable sex could be in our seventies. As our contact and intimacy has developed so too has our sex life. What I experience now is infinitely better in every dimension to anything I experienced as a young man. I have never desired a woman as much as I desire Eva. I have never experienced such intense pleasure, nor wanted to give a woman as much pleasure as I regularly feel now.
Part of what has happened over the years is that we have become each other’s ideal sexual partner. Eva responds very positively when I wear the outfits that she finds sexy; I do the same for her. I have learned to kiss her in just the way that turns her on the most – because when I get it right she involuntarily opens her legs a little. I am a quick learner and Eva now regards me as the world champion kisser. So this is a win-win dynamic that ends up with us being each other’s dreamboat. When coupled with the deep affection, years of deepening intimacy and profound contact, it is not hard to understand why the sex should be so amazingly good. We have shared an amazing time together. We have raised four children, run a business, run countless personal development groups, been on 4-wheel drive adventures in the Australian outback, taken weird drugs in the Amazon and shared the joy of loving our grand children. We are each other’s long term companion. We know the other’s foibles and talents. We care profoundly for each other and live in a state of deep contentment and fulfilment. I had no idea life could be this amazing.
The Beginning (1979)
I remember it quite vividly because it was one of the first time that I allowed myself to feel how utterly lonely I was. I was in a hotel room in Stockholm, half way through a British Council sponsored trip to visit energy research centres in Scandinavia. I was 30 and flattered to be feted in this way; it was the first time I had flown so much and spent night after night in swanky hotels. This hotel was swanky alright. There was some serious communication kit in my room – well serious for 1975. But all of it only spoke to me in Swedish – and anyway, as I allowed myself to feel what was really going on with me, there was no one anywhere that I felt like contacting. There were hundreds of people I knew, but none of them knew me. They couldn’t; I didn’t know me, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know me.
I had separated from my first wife two years earlier after a loveless marriage. A year or so later I had fallen in love with a young woman at the University, Laura, and experienced a period of bliss. But that had lasted only 6 weeks and I had no idea how to retrieve any of the feelings – all I had now was the memory of loving feelings and currently a lot of hurt and rejection. If I was honest with myself I only wanted a relationship with a woman so I could have sex on a regular basis – and after a short period when this was the case, all my relationships had failed to provide me with anything like regular sex.
When I was a physics research student at Cambridge University I had started a student society promoting Social Responsibility in Science. As a result I started researching the production and use of energy and had an insight that if humankind used fossil or nuclear energy on the same scale as the sun’s input then we would alter our climate with devastating consequences. What’s more this level of energy use would occur within my lifetime if current trends continued. I took a teaching post at the Open University a few years later and started an energy research group to explore this further. What were the implications of population and economic growth if the amount of energy that could be used was limited? Then in 1973 there was an oil crisis, the price of fuels went through the roof and the UK was put on a three-day working week. Suddenly everyone was interested in my research. I wrote a Penguin Special that became a best seller and within two years my research group was one of the largest in the University. I was invited to give talks, to appear on TV and became something of an energy guru.
However the more I gained worldly success the worse I felt. Internally I felt worthless. If someone praised me I dismissed them as “someone who doesn’t really know me.” I was forever in the position of Groucho Marx who didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept someone like him as a member. The voice in my head was forever ready to criticise what I did, but never praise me – which sounds remarkably like my mother! I now understand that a lot of my drive to achieve and succeed was driven by a desire to overcome this sense of inner worthlessness. But each new success, each new accolade simply made the contrast between my inner and outer worlds more acute. At the time I just felt more miserable and uptight. I smoked cigarettes to calm myself – but that gave me headaches. So I took powerful pain killers to relieve the headaches, which, along with a lot of spicy food, gave me a bad ulcer.
A lot of this came into focus on the trip to Scandinavia. I met strangers who pretended to be interested in me, but were, like me, wondering what on earth we were doing together. I normally kept my feelings at bay by doing a lot of things – anything to occupy my mind. But on this trip there was nothing to distract me. So I steadily became more depressed, feeling very lonely, very miserable and not having the foggiest idea what I could do to change it.
I remember coming downstairs one morning after I came back from the trip and looking in the mirror. I had my normal headache and was looking forward to taking painkillers. I was feeling wretched and miserable. But as I looked in the mirror I was struck by how gaunt and ill I looked. My hair was starting to fall out, my teeth looked awful and inside I felt depressed. Here was Peter Chapman the energy guru, the man with a dozen research students and dozens of academic papers to his name. I stared at the image for a while and then said out loud, to myself, “you are slowly killing yourself. This has got to stop”. I engaged with another round of trying to give up smoking and resolved to drink less – but had no idea what else to try.
I knew that the level of fear and stress I experienced when giving public talks was a significant part of the problem. Quite often I would be so freaked out as I started to give a talk that I went into a zone where I was listening to myself talk, often with some surprise. I had always prepared what I was going to say quite carefully, but once I had freaked out I found myself altering the talk in surprising, and remarkably effective, ways. At the end of these experiences I always felt totally and utterly drained. Yet in 1976 I gave 200 of these public talks. No wonder my hair was falling out.
Looking back I can now see that all my relationships were a mess, but at the time I was so lacking in awareness that the state of my relationships was not even on my radar. They were just the way they always had been – it was normal to feel lonely, miserable and uncared for. I hardly ever saw any members of my working-class childhood family. By going to Cambridge University in 1963 I had entered a world that was alien to them (and to me) and now found very little in common with their interests. When I first separated from my first wife I looked after our two sons (then aged 18 and 36 months) alone. However since she moved a long way away I now saw them only in school holidays. I was in a tumultuous relationship with Laura – more often arguing than having a good time. And now it looked as if my relationships with the people I worked with, in the energy research group (ERG), were really going bad. Partly because I was away a lot – giving talks and going to conferences and so on – and partly because I failed to provide adequate academic guidance, a lot of the research students and research fellows felt at a loss and abandoned by me. Crazy rumours were circulating about how I was planning all sorts of changes, none of which had ever occurred to me.
There were people at the University with whom I had wide ranging conversations, not only about academic subjects but also about why the world seemed to be in such a mess. With two particular colleagues the conversations often focussed personal awareness. I was fascinated, and without really knowing why I started to read Carl Rogers, Chris Argyris and later Ram Dass. Although I was fascinated I also knew that I did not understand key ideas they were talking about – for example it took me several years before I understood what Carl Rogers meant by ‘acceptance’, or what Argyris meant by ‘congruence’. What I did appreciate then was that honest communication was a key to improving relationships in all walks of life.
With this in mind I organised an ‘away-day’ meeting of my research group with a view to sorting out the mess we were in. At the meeting I was gob-smacked by the way in which the members of the group took what I intended as suggestions as instructions. I had no idea that what I said carried so much weight. I was striving to run the group on democratic principles in which everyone had an equal say. Much later I realised how stupid this was, but at the time it was devastating to start to understand how others saw me. Indeed the only way that I could see to resolve the issue was to declare that I would step down from running the group once I had helped everyone then in post to have one contract renewal. The meeting was in 1976 and by 1978 I had fulfilled my commitment and was free to take seriously my commitment to change – but I still had no idea where to start or what to do. Around the time I my relationship with the ERG was particularly fraught Laura had fallen in love with someone else. But rather than quit our relationship she became committed to an open relationship. She encouraged me to have affairs with other women and even invited other women to share our bed. But it was not what I wanted and the dire state of this relationship was part of my sense of loneliness and desperation. I was willing to explore almost anything in order to find a way of improving my life.
The Journey
This book is about the transformation from the desperately lonely and miserable man in 1979 to the man who in 2019 feels deeply loved, content and fulfilled. It is the story of a profound inner journey – a journey that is not finished; my life continues to improve, I continue to learn new things about myself and the world I inhabit. It is also the story of a profound relationship that Eva and I have forged over the last 40 years. It is not a co-incidence that we started our relationship close to the beginning of my inner journey. What is remarkable is that Eva has elected to accompany me on this journey, that we have found our own way to a relationship that has no precedents in our lives and is regarded as exceptional by everyone who knows us.
I found it hard to write both the preceding sections, but for very different reasons. They both caused me to cry, but again for very different reasons. Writing about the present, how I am now, caused me to cry with love and gratitude. I found it difficult to write because unless someone has experienced something similar I fear that words will fail to convey the depth of love, the intensity of the lust and the depth of the satisfaction that I regularly experience. As with so many profound experiences, until someone has experienced something similar for themselves the description is inadequate.
My difficulty in describing my life prior to my inner journey is very different. Whenever I try to write about it I become depressed. If I read my early journals I become even more depressed – because reading my own description of those times puts me back in touch with the loneliness, misery and .. well nothingness that I experienced. I cry with sadness and let go more of the tears that I held back for much of the first thirty years of my life. Until sometime in the mid 1970s I was totally unaware of my own feelings and even less aware of other people’s feelings. People thought I was somehow immune to what other people thought of me: I was because it never occurred to me that they would think or feel anything about me. So trying to describe my inner world at that time is like trying to describe a peculiar sort of blankness. I also struggle to convey the depth of the desperation that I experienced; I desperately wanted to change but had no idea where to begin or what to do.
I have already mentioned that for several years now Eva and I have received feedback from complete strangers on how inspired they are by witnessing our relationship. They say that we inspire them with hope that their relationship can flourish and become as full of love and sexiness as ours. Frequently people giving us this feedback will also ask us “what made the difference?”, or “what is your secret?” We have given quite a few short answers to these enquiries; one of Eva’s favourites is to say “No secrets” – reflecting the fact that our love and intimacy is based on complete openness and honesty between us. But any short answer to these enquiries is inevitably misleading. One of my original motives for writing this book was to give an extended answer to “what made the difference?” It is the forty years of deep self inspection, the willingness to be wrong, the willingness to change. I could not have arrived here without those 40 years of deep inner work. And I want people to know that all that work was worth it. The world that Eva and I now share is truly remarkable and I believe that it is available to everyone willing to put in the work. One dear friend describes what we are doing now as “harvesting the fruits of all our work” and I think he is absolutely right. In assembling this account of my spiritual journey I have had an invaluable resource available, namely the journals and retreat notebooks that I have kept since 1980. On a rough count they contain close to two million words and in the process of writing this I have read pretty well all of them. The reading has often depressed me because I am strongly reminded of how I used to think and behave. However I have also discovered things that are well documented in the journals that I had completely forgotten – so I have been surprised as well. Finally looking back over the last 40 years of my life has enabled me to see patterns of development and unfolding that were invisible when I was living through them. Some simply emerge in the narrative that follows. Others I point out, usually prefaced by “with the wisdom of hindsight”. Quite frequently I quote from the journals or notebooks verbatim. When I do so the text is presented in italics like this.
Next.
A Master's Path 