Spirit Beckons

By Barry Schwartzbach

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

Just as I was maturing into adulthood Spirit beckoned me.

It was the early 1970’s. The Viet Nam war was raging and so were the youth of America. We were demanding “peace, now” and freedom and equality for all. It was a time when I thought we would change the world. But the war dragged on. Demonstrations and rallies gave way to work and marriage and the realization that change had to come from inside and then be reflected back into the world. And so the search began.

I started to read Eastern Philosophy. I tried meditation, read the Bhagavad Gita and was ready to renounce the world in search of my Self. At around the same time I met some “Jesus Freaks” (today we would call them ‘Born Again Christians’) and accepted Jesus in my heart. This was a little unsettling to my Jewish spouse and parents as I was trying to cover all the bases. But as I continued to read eastern thought, replete with karma, reincarnation, bhakti yoga (the path of love), and meditation, it was those concepts that I felt in touch with. Almost as if I already knew them but had only forgotten.

I was torn between the “steep path” of renunciation and the “middle path” of being a householder. Of course I was already married so to renounce it all would have meant ripping my life apart. My thirst for Spirit was strong but I was floundering on my own, unsure of what path to take. I called out to the Universe for a teacher, someone who knew the path. Someone I could trust for guidance and inspiration… and then, the Universe delivered.

My wife showed me a flyer that she had seen in the Dentist’s office about a Swami teaching selected verses from, ancient Hindu texts, the Upanishads. The flyer spoke of his time as a monk and his many years of experience in spiritual life. We went to see him and started a relationship that lasted over 12 years. After 5 years, in 1978, my wife and I were founding members of an Ashram or Spiritual Center, with this Swami and lived there until 1985.

Looking back from this vantage point I am struck as to how one of the first verses we studied in the Upanishads class really foreshowed our time with the Swami. It was roughly…” What is like nectar in the beginning but becomes poison in the end”? And…” What is like poison in the beginning but becomes nectar in the end”?

The answers to the questions are: living only for material things brings poison in the end; living a life dedicated to Spirit brings nectar in the end. Imagine my surprise when my expectation of receiving nectar became the reality of eating lots and lots of poison.

The details are not important, but when the Ashram ended, with an explosive force that sent its residents and the Swami out in all directions, what resulted in me was anger, shame and loss of faith in my concept of God at that time. I was disgusted with myself for having relied so heavily on another human for my own spiritual well being and resolved that it would never happen again.

So there I was, 33 years old, cast adrift. All of my beliefs had been shaken. I was filled with doubt, anger, judgment and I was a huge victim. A victim of another human who, I believed had played me and my wife as patsies, a victim of my own false beliefs that caused me to put my faith outside of myself and a victim to my own internal judge who mercilessly punished me for having ‘failed’ at spiritual life. Oh, and did I mention, I was angry?

This anger was to become a major challenge in my life as I sought to rebuild some semblance of normalcy. All through the time at the Ashram my wife and I had worked at jobs outside, helping to support the place financially as well as with our intention and action. Now, we had our jobs but not much else. We lived with my mother-in-law until we found our own place and tried to put our lives back together. It was not easy. The pain we carried impacted all that we did or tried to do, but slowly as time healed the shock and confusion, we became as any working couple in the world, buying a house and starting to think about a family.

We had healed enough that we decided to have a child and in 1989, our son was born. For a while I was able to forget, at least on the surface, about the pain and perceived betrayal. To have a child, with all of the promise and joy that that brought, helped immensely, but if I looked inside of myself there was still this volcano of anger waiting to erupt at any moment. As I saw this anger in me it only reminded me of my ‘failure’, and so I pushed it away, not wanting to feel it and instead denying that it was there. I had an image of myself as calm and peaceful, someone who could flow with life’s ups and downs. In fact my name at the Ashram was “Prashant”, or ‘peaceful’ and it was that self image that was now in direct opposition to how I felt.

This dichotomy of my self-image and who I really was continued to plague me for many years. I grew to hate myself and what I had become, an angry frustrated person who didn’t trust anyone or even me. Yet, this deep inner longing for what I had started to call ”The Highest Source”, was a real part of me. I refused, however, to seek help from outside of myself, believing that I would not be able to trust anyone again.
By the mid 1990’s I could hardly feel anything except my anger and frustration. I had spent 10 years just trying to recover my balance in this world and I wasn’t having any success. It was at this point that a dear friend of mine took me to a psychic. To say that I was cynical, would be a major understatement, but this person told me things that helped me to open up a bit and I began to look for ways to release and heal. I started to begin the process of forgiveness but mostly this was focused outside of me. I still hadn’t begun to forgive myself, not really seeing the need, believing that if I forgave others my anger and frustration would disappear. It did not.

At this critical point in my life, another friend gave me a book tape of The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, as read by Peter Coyote. This book changed my life. Suddenly, through the simple and direct language used by Don Miguel, I began to see what I needed to do to recover my integrity and my enthusiasm for life. As I read Don Miguel’s description of the parasite who feeds on heavy emotional energy and of the judge and victim we all have in our minds, I began to recognize myself and my own situation.

Of course, if you have read The Four Agreements you know that Don Miguel not only describes ‘the human condition’, but also provides tools for us to be able to redirect our lives from ‘the path of fear’ to ‘the path of love’. These tools, the Four Agreements themselves, along with a description of the three Toltec Masteries, The Mastery of Awareness, The Mastery of Transformation and The Mastery of Intent or Love, gave me a new framework to practice reclaiming responsibility for my own life. However, I found that practicing on my own, while beneficial, left me with many questions. I was beginning to transform my life a little at a time but I was confused about what specifically to practice that would have the most impact. I got a chance to spend a weekend workshop with Don Miguel and his son Don Jose Ruiz and I took it. After that I traveled to the city of the Toltec’s, Teotihuacan, north of Mexico City, with Don Jose. Still later I attended another weekend workshop.

Each time I came home inspired and with more focus about what to practice. But I wanted more contact with a Toltec community. Don Miguel and Don Jose were living in California. I began to desire a community of Toltec’s on the East coast. At about that time I started to receive e-mails from Rita Rivera a Toltec Master Teacher personally trained by Don Miguel. There was a group called Life Mastery Programs, meeting in Winsted, Ct. that had quarterly programs. I still had to overcome my distrust of teachers. I also had to fully understand that a teacher’s role was not to take responsibility for the student but to provide tools to enable the student to make their own transformation.

I approached the group with caution and spent at least my first year testing the leaders to see if they were trying to take advantage of me. To my great relief they passed all my tests. At the same time I started to transform my life.

In the beginning of my association with Life Mastery Programs what I experienced in that community was the love and acceptance of seekers all trying to unfold their own spiritual beings. I also observed individuals making progress on the path and the more I saw that, the more I believed that I could also change my life.

I joined Life Mastery Dreaming, an intense, 3 year program designed to help seekers transform their lives from the path of fear to the path of love. We met for one weekend each month, learning tools and techniques designed to clear false beliefs and to slowly uncover the love and joy which is our natural state. I can report that this process works and that the results are real.

An integral part of the Dreaming process is the identification and clearing of our emotional wounds. We learn to become aware of those areas in our lives that are painful to look at, that we push away rather than deal with. We are asked to feel these uncomfortable feelings. More than that, we are asked to embrace those heavy, dark areas in order to release all the energy we have used in keeping them hidden.

The principle behind this practice is that, the more we feel our emotions as they occur and allow them to move through us rather than not feeling and denying them, the more clear we are to be in our natural human state of love and joy.     

In my case, I had to see my anger and release it. I had to accept that, yes, I was angry and I was ashamed of my anger. I had to forgive not only those whom I perceived had ‘wronged’ me but also I had to forgive myself. Slowly, I was able to see and release most of the heavy energy I had been carrying for all those years.

I am transforming into that being I have always sought to be. I am still working and will continue working my process for the rest of my life on this earth, but I am no longer that frustrated, angry man that I feared I would always be.

Now I can see that freedom is based in choice. I can make a choice in every moment to believe or not believe the limitations that my programmed mind is telling me that I am. This process is about “healing, empowerment and service”. First we heal the old wounds based on false beliefs, then we feel empowered to really take control of our own lives and finally we want to serve the world in some way to share the love, joy and clarity that is the natural result of this work.

This work is about giving up our victimhood, taking responsibility for our own lives, and embracing love. This love, which is the goal of all religions, is attainable and real and starts with loving ourselves. Once we can find that love of self, we can also love the rest of humanity and the world. This then is the change I sought so many years ago when my spirit first beckoned.

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