I regularly questioned my wise man about the level of my activity and whether I should be doing less. His answers were always the same. Basically he said it was entirely my choice. There was no Divine plan as to what I should or should not do. I could choose what to manifest. He did, however, emphasise that it was critical that I maintain a good level of awareness and do everything from a place of love, not from a place of greed or ego-drive. Of all the comments he made the one that threw me the most was “the best is yet to come!” When I digested this, I saw that it was really a very obvious observation. I was continuing to improve the material I was teaching and be better at everything I did, so each course, each Demos pamphlet, each systems challenge was simply better than the last one. This didn’t make it any easier to stop!
Throughout this period our relationship with Yuri and Sheila continued to deepen. We started to see each other more regularly – if possible once a month – and we discussed issues that we were facing individually and in our relationships. It was helpful that although we were all involved in personal growth and leading groups, we came at issues from very different perspectives. Also, they had not participated in the sorts of groups Eva and I ran, and we had not engaged with the dance groups that they facilitated. We really appreciated their willingness to face issues head-on; they appreciated the fact that we were twenty years older and clearly further down some of the roads they wished to travel along. By the end of this period we were clearly each other’s best friends.
Another regular feature of our life in this period was parties. The highlight was Kimberley each year. We loved the whole experience and slowly got to know more people in ‘the party crowd’. In 2008 Yuri and Sheila introduced to two friends of theirs, Matthew and Vika, who would play important roles in our life later. We were both outrageous flirts and loved the fact that people 20 or 30 years younger than us responded whole heartedly. One year I dressed up as Rod Stewart and caused one young woman to scream! The most important acknowledgement we received was from complete strangers who regularly came up to us and commented on the love between us. They said that we were an inspiration – mostly because they had not seen older people so in love and so sexy with each other ever before. They would quite often ask “what’s your secret?” to which Eva would respond “having no secrets”. My response would usually be along the lines of “lots of hard work sorting stuff out between us”.
In 2007 we heard that Charles Berner had died. He was not old, 71, and died with just one or two students with him. It was a sad ending for someone who had contributed so much. In 2008 we finally completed our involvement with Enlightenment Intensives; we ran a two week and then a Master’s Training course at Ashill. I had Beryl co-Master the two week with me, Eva was in charge of the cooking. It was not a great two week – the group was unusual in several respects – but it produced a number of very lovely direct experiences. It was a poignant completion for me because Brian Thompson, who had been a star on my first two week in 1985, was also on this, my last two week. Between the first and the last he had spent many years in a Zen Buddhist monastery and when he had a powerful experience in 2008 he was quick to reassure me that this was indeed the same as the experiences people had in Zen. It was also appropriate for me to co-master this with Beryl, not only because she was carrying the torch for leading Intensives in the UK, but also because she had previously told me that she had really understood what I was up to when I ran Intensives. I asked her what she meant by that and she replied “I know you will do anything to have people have an enlightenment experience” – in other words she had understood my commitment based on the Bodhisattva vow – which in turn meant that I had passed it on to her.
Eva and I ran the Master’s Training course together. It was the fifth that we had undertaken and we knew what we were doing and loved working together once more. During the course one of the participants had a lovely experience and, as usual for such courses, I interviewed her in front of the group. The aim was to demonstrate how to conduct such an interview and also give the participants an opportunity to judge for themselves whether she had had a genuine experience. She said “Suddenly the whole world looked completely different. It reminded me of opening the curtains early in the morning and discovering that it had snowed overnight. I knew that the world was the same, but covered in snow it looked so much more beautiful and serene. It was just like that – though with the sun shining and no snow anywhere and I knew it was all love!” I was in tears because I received the experience directly from her. I was also delighted because she had participated in many long Intensives with me and this was the clearest and most profound experience she had had. It was a fabulous ending to my career as a Master of Intensives.
Throughout all this activity my relationship with Eva remained the most important aspect of my life. We continued to face issues and, over time, become closer and more in love. But this was not without difficulty. One significant difficulty at the beginning of the period occurred after I had all my teeth extracted. This was necessary because my gum disease meant my teeth were literally falling out. The difficulty was that Eva hated the sight of me without any teeth, indeed quite soon after the operation she made it clear that she didn’t know whether she could continue to be with me. This happened after I had the teeth extracted and before I had the system of implants several months later. I’m not sure why but I decided that she needed to know that I was not really any different without teeth and gave her a very long, sexy kiss. She was amazed. The kiss with no teeth was just as good, and she stopped complaining. Once I had the new teeth on implants Eva actually thought I looked better than before the operations, but it was unpleasant whilst she thought I looked repulsive. I should also add that she has apologised profusely several times to me about her rejection since then – but at the time it felt awful. It took me about 18 months to get over the sequence of operations involved in replacing my teeth. This was a significant factor in my frequent bouts of exhaustion.
Quite often during the periods of exhaustion I would notice how little Eva was doing around the house. I did most of the cooking, cleaning and shopping as well as growing fruit and veg in the garden and generally keeping everything in good repair. On one such occasion I confronted Eva about her lack of contribution and insisted that she ceased being so lazy. I was grateful that she responded positively – in part because she recognised that she was not doing much and also because whenever I made a request like this she took it seriously. Her offer to do more did not always work out. One time, when I was teaching her how to use the sit-on mower she drove it into the pond! Fortunately, she was not hurt – but the lawnmower was. It also took us several hours to haul it out of the pond using my (small) tractor.
When reading the journals of this period it became clear that we ran into some sort of difficulty every few months. Sometimes we resorted to getting stoned together to discover the root of the difficulty we were facing, other times it was just obvious. Once the issue between us was clearly recognised we were able to sort it out together – usually quite quickly – with the result that we felt closer and more loving. However, there was one issue that was not resolved during this period – namely Eva’s struggle with accepting the level of contact and intimacy that I sought.
The issue would arise most often when we were stoned alone together. At some point I would be overwhelmed with my love for her and just gaze at her lovingly. Eva experienced this as me being ‘too much’. She would often say that the love she saw pouring out of me was too intense; she felt like a rabbit caught in headlights. She retreated by breaking eye contact and moving away from physical contact. My experience was of entering a love state in which I just wanted to adore this beautiful woman for the rest of my life. And I wanted her to meet me in that place and reciprocate the feeling. It was always slightly painful when she backed away. I learned that my best strategy was to back away myself, giving Eva the space to come towards me – but frequently my experience of love overwhelmed me and made it difficult.
Not all the difficulties we ran into were down to Eva’s characteristics. I am not an easy person to live with when I’m exhausted and tired. I become crotchety and appear to want to be left alone – when in fact what I want most is affection and physical contact. When I become deeply immersed in an intellectual issue, such as writing a new pamphlet, I can become very sharp and pernickety. I do everything with high intensity – including being miserable, unkind and critical. So, there were also many times when Eva had to make an effort to get through to me and rescue me from periods of melancholy.
Not all the difficulties we faced were of our own making. At the end of 2007 a charity, the Melbourne City Mission (MCM), decided that Eva’s sister Alex required their attention. We had previously extricated Alex from the Victorian State Trustees in a court case. Since then Eva had taken responsibility for finding suitable accommodation for Alex, making sure she had adequate funding and taking her out and about whenever we were in Australia. Eva also organised stuff for Alex’s son Gabriel. For a variety of reasons Eva had not been able to visit Alex for a while and the MCM decided that Eva was not taking adequate care of Alex. We visited Australia and Alex in 2007 and discovered that MCM were in the process of applying for guardianship of Alex. This was very stressful for Eva, indeed when we went to Adelaide, after being with Alex, Eva had what appeared to be a heart attack at the airport. I took her to the hospital the next day for a comprehensive check-up. The doctors established that she had not had a heart attack – to our relief – but were still concerned about her high blood pressure.
After we returned to the UK we were notified of the date of the court hearing in Melbourne. Preparing for it was extremely stressful and I assumed that we would go to Melbourne together. Several friends challenged us about this saying that Eva could stand up for herself. I could see that if I was always protecting Eva then I was not giving her space to become stronger. Eva also thought it would be OK to go alone because she was anticipating support from people with whom she had been working over the years. So I reluctantly agreed that she should take this on alone.
This turned out to be a really bad decision. None of the people Eva assumed would assist her did so effectively. She was severely stressed and lost the court case – in part because her other sister, Val, took the opportunity to side with MCM against Eva. Eva came back to the UK wrecked and upset. She self inspected a great deal about what had happened and her relationships with her two sisters – and gained insight and strength from doing so. I made the decision that in similar cases I would not ever again fail to protect Eva from anyone. The only half-good outcome from the whole process was that Val had agreed to visit Alex. Although she had lived in Melbourne all through Alex’s years of illness she had never once been to see her; it reminded her too powerfully of their mother dying in a mental hospital. It took Eva several weeks to overcome the stress and distress of the trip to Melbourne.
Despite all these difficulties we were able to continue to become closer and more loving. Indeed we continued to challenge each other to be ever more ‘real’ i.e. to own exactly what was going on in our thoughts and feelings. This increased the level of intimacy between us, which in turn increased the intensity of our sexual interactions. We noticed that we were becoming each other’s ideal sexual partner – which only added fuel to an already intense fire. The basic dynamic was very simple. Eva would dress up in a way that she knew I would find sexy and attractive – that would encourage me to be very strongly male – which elicited a very positive response from Eva. Eva loved me acknowledging her as a sexy woman, I loved her acknowledging me as a sexy man. This, in systems terms, is a very beneficial self-reinforcing feedback loop! Although my sexual energy was steadily declining, my sexual satisfaction was increasing in leaps and bounds.
Throughout 2009 our contact was steadily deepening – even though Eva sometimes found it too intense. I noticed that I was not missing running Intensives anywhere near as much as I used to. I decided it was because the level of contact I was now having with Eva was the same as that I had when people presented an experience to me. I speculated that our level of contact was becoming ‘Divine’. Certainly I felt the same level of overwhelming love, and when we were in that contact we both usually cried with joy and gratitude.
One of the many ways in which Eva and I are opposites is in our attitudes to spiritual teachers. I am not attracted to them and regularly notice that I want to find my own way. In contrast Eva loves to be inspired by someone whom she regards as more enlightened than herself and enjoys developing new spiritual practices. At one point she was inspired by a Russian guru called Anastasia. I was delighted because Anastasia was promoting the benefits of growing your own food and being more in touch with nature – which lead to Eva helping more in the garden. In late 2009 she found a new guru, an Australian woman called Isha who taught in Spain and South America. The first time Eva saw a picture of Isha she was wearing an amazing outfit and riding a horse with a falcon on her wrist; Eva adored the image and decided this was the guru for her! She started using Isha’s meditation practice and found it immediately beneficial.
In early 2010 Eva attended an Isha workshop in Barcelona and returned full of enthusiasm for Isha and her teachings. However I noticed that we were not relating very well, I felt Eva was holding back from intimate contact with me. Furthermore Eva made it clear that she did not want sex or drugs or me. “When we talked about what was going on she said things like, the relationship prevented her being herself and that she didn’t want the kind of sexual relationship we had previously. I was devastated by this. I had fantasies of the end of the relationship – the first time for many many years. I felt she was in denial about the beauty and intimacy of our relationship and I just couldn’t stand it. When I told her what was going on for me she got very angry and kept repeating the same things – which made matters worse. I pointed out that the result of her going to the Isha workshop was both of us in agony – there was a lot less love available – which was not the outcome anyone wanted.”
It turned out that the workshop had triggered Eva into “huge seam of self-loathing”. In particular it had brought to the surface material from her first marriage that had been buried for nearly 40 years. At the core she had seen how she had demeaned herself in that relationship which had fed a deep sense of self-loathing. We struggled to make progress until just over a week later we were stoned and resolved to sort out whatever was going on. Here is a slightly edited account from the journal:
It was clear that something was going wrong; I was feeling hurt and vulnerable and Eva much less present. Eva was also putting herself down. A repeating theme was Eva discounting the contact and relationship we had before she went to Barcelona.
What is spiritual? What is more awake? Had Eva discovered something a lot more profound with Isha than the qualities in our relationship? I argued that what we had was real, it was love – and in my view – it was Divine. To turn her back on this was to turn away from love, not towards it. At this point Eva got that she had had a giant blind spot about where Love lay and had discounted our relationship.
I continued to show my hurt and to be vulnerable and to cry. I wanted her to know that her actions were causing me real distress. The bit that gnawed away inside me was the doubt that she valued what we had. Was it just my trip that our closest contact was Divine? If she had really found something different and better then maybe I was deluded – and maybe our relationship would end.
Eva received my vulnerability and thanked me for not closing off. In one of our cuddles I said “How could you forget what we had?” I said it from a very deep place and she got it. She felt her heart impacted directly and recognised that she had been resisting facing the pain of closing off to her first husband. My words echoed hers all those years ago: “How could you put what we had at risk?”
This was a turning point. Eva apologised for turning away, for not seeing what she was doing. Her pain in that first marriage was the bit she hadn’t faced – and my question got to the heart of it literally. She saw that this is what had been triggered in the Isha workshop and that to be more open to me she had to confront the devastation she felt closing he heart in that relationship.
We had to return to the issues involved a few more times before we were back in complete harmony, but once again it was a stoned conversation that enabled us to find our way through a very difficult time. I was pleased because I had broken my habitual behaviour when feeling hurt by Eva. Instead of closing off and going cold I let her see my hurt and vulnerability. She also noticed this and was grateful for my change. This was also the first time that the dynamic involved me feeling Eva’s hurt before she connected to it – our usual dynamic had it the other way around. It is also interesting to note that one of the benefits from resolving this issue was that our intimacy and sex life became deeper and even more satisfying.
Later in the year we decided to have a clean out and to meditate more intensely. After a few days of surrender meditation I had a yogic dream – a lucid dream whilst meditating – in which I was saying goodbye to Eva. It was not clear which of us was dying, but we both knew that we would not be seeing each other in these bodies again. When the dream ended I was overwhelmed with grief. I just howled because I knew that what I had seen in the dream would happen one day and I couldn’t bear the thought of it. When the deep sobbing had died down I made a vow to spend as much quality time with Eva as possible before that day arrived. I was already prioritising our relationship – but now there was a sense of urgency to it. I did not want to arrive at the day of separation thinking I could have done more to be with her! I told Eva about the dream and, unbeknown to me at the time, it had a similar effect on her. Much later she told me that up to then she had been holding back from deep contact because she was afraid of how much she would miss me when I died. After the dream she put that aside and decided to go for the love and contact regardless.
A month or so later we had a series of conversations about different models of making progress in terms of personal awareness. We both started our inner journeys using a therapeutic model. In this framework one identifies an attitude or neurosis and then work on it with a view to resolving it. The therapeutic ideal is to free enough of one’s attitudes and personal history to be able to make conscious choices. When we became engaged with Enlightenment Intensives we adopted a spiritual model in which the aim was to be open enough to be able to transcend one’s attitudes and neuroses. In this framework the ideal is to be ‘enlightened’, which roughly translates into being a saint. To me the ideals held up in each system seemed to be unhelpful because they were so far out of reach that they fostered a sense of inadequacy.
Whilst I was Mastering the 6-week in 1998 I noticed that in my lectures I kept returning to a Zen Master who said, in several different ways, “enlightenment lies not in perfection but in the acceptance of one’s imperfections”. Now I thought I could see a way to make this more practical by framing it within our relationship. I started to talk about a ‘relationship path’ in which some personal history was accommodated within the relationship. Furthermore the depth of contact between us was a clear indicator of how open we were – with the ultimate aim of being in a state of Divine Love together. One of the attractions of this approach is that we both recognised that some aspects of our childhood had shaped us so profoundly that they would never disappear – but we could help each other accept the consequences. For example, I become irrationally scared whenever I travel, I literally watch my body go through fear reactions without being able to control it. Having Eva aware of what was happening to me and providing sympathy and support made it much easier for me to accept this about myself. Eva thought this was a really useful set of ideas and liked the idea of a ‘relationship path’.
At the end of 2010 we had another long trip to Australia. Whilst we were there Eva had an experience of being Love. It was not clear whether it was a direct experience, but whatever it was she was radiant for a few days afterwards. We were very close and she only backed off from contact a few times – most of the time she loved it when I ‘glowed’.
We saw Brian in Bangkok on our way to Australia. He was clearly unwell and starting to hide away from his friends. I started talking to him about coming back to the UK before he ran out of money. However, he was still resisting all attempts to provide any form of help or assistance.
Shortly after we returned home in 2011 Eva went to Uruguay for a two-week retreat with Isha. When she returned she was determined to cease using drugs and alcohol and wanted me to join her in a new spiritual practice based on Isha’s work. I found her position hard for two reasons. The first was that she was in some denial about the state of our relationship and how close and loving it had become. Secondly, similar to when she returned from Barcelona, she was putting herself down, not acknowledging the enormous and productive work she had done on herself for the last 40 years.
Although I was willing to support Eva exploring a new process I noticed that I reacted each time that she was not accepting herself. She had told me some of what went on in the group and how she had blown everyone away during the two-week workshop. She was gratified by Isha’s recognition of her level of awareness. However, I still felt Eva had given away her power and her abilities whilst there.
Whether to be stoned together became an issue. Whilst away Eva had decided that she would not get stoned any more. I said that before I could accept that I would like us to have one last stoned conversation because I believed that by doing so I would understand it all a lot more. She reluctantly agreed to this and we smoked a joint together. Quite quickly Eva started to see that she had given away her power in the Isha workshop. She was surprised at the degree to which she had put Isha up on a pedestal and denigrated herself. She initially thought that my comments were due to disagreeing with Isha but then realised that what I was objecting to was her lowering her self-esteem. Eva was shocked to see this. On reflection she said that she did have to face up to more of her self loathing – and that it was very hard to do in the relationship because I was constantly telling her how much I loved her and thought she was beautiful. The bigger picture that emerged was that Eva was dealing with her resistances to being more open to love and in closer contact with me.
This did a lot to resolve the distance between us, but despite this I continued to struggle. Here are journal entries six weeks after Eva’s return from Uruguay.
This morning I still feel sad. I realise this has a lot to do with feeling that the agreements I thought we had were broken. There are so many misunderstandings it is hard to believe we were ever really together. I recognise that when Eva puts herself down I experience that as a betrayal – or at least as breaking our understanding. She is no longer the woman with whom I share love states and moments of bliss. I can see that she may have stuff to work out to be more open to love, but I would like us to work on it together so that I don’t experience this sense of loss.
….
I had to get Eva to stop reacting to what I was saying and just hear how things were for me. It was a struggle but I finally got across my devastation when she backed away from our contact and love, how much it hurt each time she forgot who she was in our relationship and how I couldn’t face the pain of these losses after each step forward that we take together. She got it and I experienced relief.
…
Eva connected to her experience in Sydney yesterday morning in her meditation. “I am Love” – this was what she was resisting and running away from. I got her to present it to me – she was very beautiful. We both thought it would provide closure on the issue – but it didn’t. So I visited my wise man to ask for his help and advice. He took his time and then started to talk about the core issue of me wanting to be in control. He said that Eva’s engagement with Isha had opened up a profound divergence in our paths – and it was that divergence that led to me feeling a loss of agreement and betrayal. He said Eva was running into limits and had to find ways of working for herself. She had not done the intense work I did Mastering long Intensives, so she needed to sort out important issues. It took another two weeks of conversations to complete the re-pairing of our relationship. One morning, in her meditation, Eva had an experience of being ‘perfect as I am’. She felt that she had reached the level of loving herself that she had set out to do by going to Uruguay. She ceased running away from the experience she had in Sydney of being Love. At the same time I recalled how, about 5 or 6 years earlier, I had decided to be more myself – and that what I really was, was Love. I was no longer interested in changing myself. These insights opened the door to a series of blissful times together. However there remained a significant divergence in our paths. I was into accepting myself and being more real; Eva was into uncovering her resistance to being more open to love and other issues.
Next.
A Master's Path 