Death, Money and Sex: The Open Secret

A beautiful, passionate, soulful artist and mother reached out to me to coach her recently. She was eagerly wanting something and sensed that it might be found in the connection her intuition told her to follow.

But by the time was approaching for her scheduled session, she was in an entirely different place than she had expected to be.

A beloved person in her life unexpectedly and tragically died.

She cancelled her session, wanting to howl and grieve and be alone instead.

I could relate.

Boy could I relate.

This week, in fact, is the one year anniversary since my own mother passed away.

There have been so many hours of howling and grieving. Even some, yes, this very morning.

Like animals who run off to the cave to lick their wounds, we humans, too, have a wisdom and knowing that draws us inward in times of deep pain and sadness.It is part of the human experience: the allegorical archetype of diving into pain and loss and tragedy like Persephone and then, by some miraculous resiliency that’s part of the human spirit, coming back to life.

But this depth of common experience can only be revealed when we are willing to go down deep into our own psyches. And for many, the conflict between wanting to look good and put together on the surface can raise a deep conflict with the inner yearning and desire to howl like an animal at times.

Isn’t that what wild animals do, after all?

Howl and hide in caves and then, eventually, come back to circle into the pack of other animals?

What I wanted so much was to deeply honor my artist friend who wanted to take the time to howl and grieve and experience the deep loss. To know that that depth of being is what makes us most deeply human.

Week after week, I see clients who want richer, fuller, more meaningful lives. They - we - want more joy, more peace, more fulfillment in our lives.

And the ones who get those lives I have seen again and again, are the ones with the courage to both wail like a wild wounded animal or a puppy that’s been taken from it’s momma … and show up to the pack of animals again.

There is a paradox that, while there is a time to be alone in the cave to lick one’s wounds, in our culture especially, that is where the story ends.

We lose a child, a friend, a partner or a beloved pet.

A relationship fails.

Our political leadership goes mad, making choices that look insane.

We face the reality of our childish and inauthentic relationship with money.

In all these instances, our habitual tendency is to hide out alone, and then start to cope alone.

We turn to compulsive busyness, to keep the pain of loneliness from seeping in.

We turn to fixing ourselves to hopefully avoid the pain of ever feeling vulnerable to loss again.

We numb out on empty carbs, one too many glasses of wine after the kids are in bed, or sexual misadventures.

All these things we try to cope with alone. 

Death. Money. Sex.

Rather than pretending they don’t cause us all pain, we can try something different.

We can try to accept what the poet Rumi referred to as the Open Secret, that I first heard about from one of my mentors at the Omega Institute for Holistic Learning, author Elizabeth Lesser. 

You know that thing when your friends ask how it’s going and you say, “Great!” with a big smile on your face while you are secretly freaking out about the fact that your new husband won’t have sex with you?

Or when your boss asks if you need some time off to deal with health issues and you say, “No, no, I’m FINE!” because you're secretly terrified of losing your health insurance, job and financial security if you tell the truth?

Or when your friend who is a little more outwardly successful, more organized and well-spoken asks you to support a cause she’s involved in and you say yes but secretly think, “Shit, she has it all together and I am going to look so stupid next to her. What’s the hell is wrong with me?”

What Rumi invites us to do, way back from the 13th century, is to stop pretending it’s all fine and cop to the open secret. Because we are all pretending and that's partially what causes the suffering and isolation. 

To reveal your hurt and your truth to another, safely and appropriately, is where authentic connection is made.

And this is where mindfulness comes in.

By developing a practice of “paying attention on purpose in the present moment without judgment” (in the words of mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn) you begin to watch your thoughts, feelings and beliefs and not take them so seriously.

You can watch them rise and fall in your mind and body, and let them go without telling such a long involved story about what a loser you are, how everybody else is better at life than you, and how lonely you are.

Or how it is always going to hurt like it does now.

With a regular mindfulness practice of even a few minutes a day, you learn to rest in compassionate presence with yourself. And when you can cultivate self-compassion towards the parts of yourself you judge the most, you can begin to open up to the compassion in others.

Let me be honest here: I have in no way mastered this.

But I am nowhere near where I once was in terms of vicious self-judgment.

The open secret is that we all have pain.

Death, money and sex cause every human alive to have challenges at some point or another in life. It’s the human condition, not a personal failure.

And when we can accept it, and accept the loving kindness available to us, both within our skin and in others, we come back to life and light.

The Circle of Life

It's the Circle of Life

And it moves us all

Through despair and hope

Through faith and love

Till we find our place

On the path unwinding

In the Circle

The Circle of Life

Tim Rice and Elton John

Like all young in the animal kingdom, I adored my mother when I was a small child. 

I was absolutely convinced that she was the best mom, the one who smelled the sweetest, the one whose arms were the most gentle, the one whose hands could stroke any pain or sorrow out of my curly brown hair simply by touching it.

Everything in my biology told me that this person was the key to my survival and, as such, she was the most important thing in my life. From an evolutionary perspective, the mother-child bonding occurred perfectly and without a hitch.

And in harmony with nature’s perfectly timed clockwork, whether lion cubs, puppies or kittens or baby ducks, eventually it came time for this new member of the tribe to look around and see the rest of the world. Very quickly, I especially noticed the other baby animals and their mothers, and that is probably when the fall from the pedestal began.

Indeed, for the next several decades of my life, I could only see how the other mothers nurtured their young, what they gave to them and what I wasn’t getting. It was especially prevalent with my aunt and cousins: she seemed to be the perfect mother, suckling her young in a way that made me wistful.

My mother’s way of raising me was, to put it mildly, far more unconventional. Because of her formative years and growing up, she was much more of the “let-her-figure-it-out-on-her-own” school. After all, she had done it and it had helped her survive as a young cub.

I was the kid who would be picked up hours after school had ended with a sheepish look on my face, the one who had to figure out how to make friends without a mom at home who knew my classmates’ names, the one who had to go outside of the small cocoon of the nuclear family to get basic needs met from a very, very young age. One of my other aunts tells the story of how, at the age of four, I would climb up on the kitchen cabinets to get cereal to make my own breakfast. She was appalled and judged my mother fiercely for that, as did I.

But the circle of life gives us opportunities to go back to the beginning and see things with a fresh perspective.

Nearly six years ago, when I was living in Europe, my mother was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic breast cancer. From that very first phone call, I knew it was terminal and that there was no time to waste. Nature compelled me to return to my roots, to go back to the den and to see and accept this fierce lion as she truly was, not as I would have had her.

Two weeks ago today, my beautiful, fierce mother passed away after a long and valiant journey, not just through cancer, but through the pain and tragedy of her own years as a small, vulnerable cub with no one to consistently protect and nurture her in her formative post-war years in Greece.

We were given the opportunity, each in her own way, to let go of the mother and daughter that we had each wanted, and to fully, completely and whole-heartedly accept the other woman as a force of nature unto her own self.

Let’s face it, for all the times I judged and criticized her for not being Betty Crocker, I’m sure I wasn’t Daughter of the Year at all times.

As I sit in the grief and loss of this time, it is so clear that my mother was not only my greatest teacher in the Buddhist sense, but also did exactly what nature had compelled her to do: to create a young one strong and capable enough of fending for herself in the jungle.

It’s no accident – if you believe in that sort of thing – that we are both Leos, too. She didn’t do this by coddling me and making it easy and I can assure you there were many, many times I desperately wanted that. She did it by recognizing the truth of my spirit, honoring her own style of mothering and letting go of what the PTA ladies thought. Of the many, many gifts my mother gave me during her time here, the desire to seek and know my own truth and live it to the best of my ability was certainly one of the greatest.

The circle of life with my mother came full-circle in the days, months and years that I cared for her during her journey with cancer. When she passed, the only thing that remained was love, gratitude and forgiveness.

So many men and women I know stay perennially stuck in what they didn’t get and deserved as a child, what they were robbed of, how it is a wonderful excuse for not thriving today. I know it well because I, too, did it for a very, very long time. Indeed, I had to then, as it was an integral part of the slow, complicated process of healing and growing up. And I am so grateful for the teachers, counselors, coaches, friends and others who validated my experience and feelings while I went through it.

But while a child can be victim, as an adult, make no mistake about it: we are volunteers if we accept and embrace the burden of the victim story.

The men and women I know who thrive in this world are those who carefully, gently and methodically – and with the help of loving, compassionate witnesses – go through the stories of the past, grieve their losses, keep the stuff that continues to serve and empower them, and let go of what doesn’t.

My mother did a great, great thing by opening up to healing and forgiveness with me, too. She didn’t have to, but she chose to. And once more I adore my mother Lioness.  

We have once again come full circle.