Heeding The Call

Beckoning, Befriending and Becoming on the Changemaker's Path.

Edvard Munch's Solenintro (1912-1913)

The evening before, I’d listened to a podcast between Robert Kennedy Jr and Charles Eisenstein while washing the dishes. Eisenstein is one of my favourite writers on the ills of our dominant culture and the promise of a more beautiful world. I was listening to the podcast because something really quite remarkable seems to be happening. Charles is working as an adviser on RFK Jr’s bid to be the next president of the USA standing on a ticket that includes honest government, regenerative agriculture, civil liberties, the environment and peace as priorities under the banner “Heal the Divide”. I could feel the hope pulsing up my spine and filling my heart. Dangerous territory. I had long since believed myself immune to the narcotic lure of Hopium, but somehow this fascinating combination of people sincerely attempting to steer our cultural supertanker away from the oncoming hurricane has given me another strong hit again. It’s the hope that kills you…I know, I know.

During their conversation, they explored what first motivated their call to environmental care, activism and changemaking. RFK Jr has been an environmental attorney for four decades and Eisenstein has written and spoken extensively in defense of our living world throughout his career. As Johanna and I traversed newly sown fields of oats and patches of river-threaded woodland on our regular morning walk, we discussed our own calls towards a life and livelihood oriented toward the More Beautiful World our Hearts know is Possible.

It’s a question that’s alive for us at the moment as we’ve been asking all the participants of the Embodied Permaculture Project this question in their entry interviews. And as Simon Sinek so eloquently laid out in his talks and book starting with Why makes the How and What so much more potent. Why do we choose to disentangle ourselves from the mainstream culture, why did and do we feel different from many of those around us, sometimes including our own families? Why is this so strong for some that it may mean a lifetime of financial and social difficulty? Why do we feel compelled to change the status quo? What does it mean to either heed or ignore The Call?

Although I was unaware of its implications, my first memory of the Call came around the age of twelve. I had been at a boarding school from age ten and during a rugby match I had injured my back sufficiently to be taken to hospital and then to be housed in the school “sanitorium” for about a month of recovery and rehab. Although my memories of the details are a little vague, I can still feel the felt sense of that time in my body. I spent most of my days alone, either laid out flat in the ward or swimming as my physiotherapy. Time felt enormous as all the busyness of a schoolchild’s life suddenly fell away leaving only solitude and silence. It was not pleasant. What I discovered underneath all my nervous energy aimed towards “getting along and getting ahead” within my community was a big fat nothing. A Void. A sense of something missing in the very centre of myself. I instinctively knew there ought to be something in the centre and yet when I searched all I discovered was a hollowness. It frightened me. But it also sparked a question in me subconsciously. If I instinctively knew there should be something at my core, what was it and how could I find it?

Unbeknownst to me, I had been contacting that very centre on occasion through meditation already. My whole family learned Transcendental Meditation when I was five or six. I fondly remember the warm attic room where I was taught to follow a mantra over and over again in my mind until thoughts stilled and I began to dive below the turbulent shallows of my mindstream into the dark, deep quiet below. TM practitioners are all given a “secret” mantra word supposedly just for them - although I now know you get given one of a handful of Sanskrit words according to your age. At that young age, I had misheard my mantra as it was whispered into my ear by my teacher. What I heard was “ink”. And so my experience of meditation often involved submerging below the surface of a black velvety oceanic liquid until I came to rest somewhere unfathomable beneath. This was a place below the jostle of thoughts and sensation. It was big and quiet and peaceful and dark. I remember lying in my bunkbed in the school dormitory, repeating my mantra over and over until my mind and body surrendered to that inky embrace. Back then I used meditation as a rescue remedy tool only in times of need. I didn’t understand you were supposed to practice regularly in order to better navigate those times of need as they arose.

The milling crowd of a boarding school is a very good distraction from most deep contemplation it turns out. You are never alone and always socialising and it took until my late teens to notice my next real experience of the Call. Again without really being consciously aware of why, I had become more and more attracted to the arcane and esoteric. I remember reading books on the Rosicrucians and other secret societies and feeling so excited that there could be a hidden knowledge beyond the mundane reality of the 1990s. That people throughout the ages had engaged in communities of practice that explored a reality and a nature that was somehow more real than this thin veneer of civilisation we all played at. I fantasized that an elder would tap me on the shoulder one day and invite me into that reality. I borrowed a book on astral projection and diligently practised the breathing techniques required to induce an out-of-body experience. I believe I actually succeeded on two occasions, but that’s another story.

I remember around that time, visiting a friend of my mother who always seemed mystical to me. She lived near Glastonbury and I recall one stormy afternoon, just me and her talking about the places in the world where the veils were thin between different dimensions of reality. I went outside into her tree-lined garden feeling the violence of the weather and having such a strong bodily experience of that thinning, of the nearness of something powerful and somewhat terrifying as I was buffeted around by wild nature just like the trees surrounding me.

I kept most of these experiences to myself. On the outside, I was a sporty, fairly popular, fairly lackadaisical student “getting on and getting ahead” just fine. But I came face to face with that same hollowness once again at the time of A-level exams as I turned 18. Normal school came to an end and a period of pre-exam study meant that there were suddenly acres of space and time again. I observed my friends diligently applying themselves to revision. They all had university places in mind and careers beyond that. I just could not for the life of me understand the why of that at all. Their path felt almost farcical to me; dry, unalive and undesirable. Why would anybody want to enter into a “career” in an office in this straightjacket of a culture?

I couldn’t understand their consensus reality and I was obviously experiencing a whole body “no” to it as I spent day after day assiduously not studying. And yet I felt no sense of alignment in that resistance. Rather than a sense that I was choosing something right, I looked around me and instead felt that there was something wrong with me, not the consensus reality I observed. The hollowness that I saw in our treadmill industrial culture was experienced as a hole in me not a hole in the world. I began to foster the deep belief that I was lazy, a drifter and lacking in worth. I felt myself to be very much lost.

I compensated with humour and with an increasing reliance on alcohol to soothe that feeling of self-dislike. I told myself I would make my own way in the world by working enough to fund a life of travel and exploration. I did that for nearly three years, six months in a customer service or sales job, six months in Asia, rinse and repeat. I had some amazing experiences, saw some amazing things, met some lovely people and yet, any time the busyness of that fell away, I noticed that same gnawing chasm in me. I remember, after months of travelling with a great Canadian guy I met on the road, him then flying home and me being alone in a city somewhere in South-East Asia. It was like I suddenly woke from the drugged thrill of “travelling” and realised I was in a scurrying uncaring city that made no sense to me. I spent a couple of weeks drifting from bar to video arcade to shopping mall feeling so, so separate from everything and everyone. So lost again.

I relented at that point and applied to university to be a journalist and then a filmmaker. I didn’t fit there really either although I did learn that I was capable of studying, capable of getting good grades after a few false starts. Maybe I wasn’t just lazy, but rather, I just needed to be engaged in something that interested me. And most importantly it’s where I met Johanna, my life partner of 25 years, while studying documentary-making for a semester in the Netherlands.

I tried the film industry for a few years. I was pretty good at it. Could play the game of location manager, of 3rd assistant director etcetera, but for someone so desperately craving depth I’d chosen just about the most shallow career possible.

Then in my mid-twenties I came into a small inheritance that paid for a decent video camera and a 9-month trip to Asia, 6 months of which spent volunteering for a charity in Nepal. I said goodbye to the shallow waters of the entertainment industry for good.

This was a different experience of travel. Johanna and I lived for several months in one Himalayan village with the village elder and his wife and children. We experienced a way of life that was totally entangled in the rhythm and pulse of nature and stood outside of most consumer culture. No electricity, no telephones, no road. The daily work of growing and harvesting a living as a small community. It was a hard life for them. Poverty and ill health were endemic and yet, in that cliche of cliches, they were happy. Really happy. The kids laughed and joked while helping with the arduous daily chores of collecting firewood and fodder for the livestock. The adults worked tirelessly, planting and harvesting and cooking and cleaning and building. And yet they had time, they celebrated, they smiled and teased and sang. It was the first time I had experienced the home as both the centre of productive life and being in the centre of Life, surrounded as we were by steep forests and mountain streams and wild creatures. There was a fullness here that I could feel as a fullness inside me.

That same trip introduced me to the work of integral theory and Ken Wilber, of Krishnamurti and of Chogyan Trungpa as well as reigniting meditation as a practice and passion. We spent 10 days on retreat at Kopan Monastery and once again I felt a wellspring and an aliveness that I was starving hungry for.

What had previously been an unconscious push against the dominant culture and pull towards something more meaningful and more alive started to blossom into my waking consciousness. So I tried to bring that fullness with me to the UK in my backpack. Tried to recreate the depths at home.

On return, we spent a year as part of a Buddhist community in Yorkshire but lovely as they were, the beautiful iconography and cultural tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, felt too alien to us. I went back to university to learn to write novels. I wrote a novel…but that wasn’t it either. I taught film and television to 16-18-year-olds for a while. That wasn’t it either. I got a job for an environmental charity working on industrial waste education. I thought using my communications skills for good would be it. It wasn’t. I tried, I really did. But I felt so alone commuting back and forth on crowded rush hour trains, standing on platforms jostled by masses of tired humans trying to get to work or to get home, to get away from where they were. It felt like it was killing me. I relied more on alcohol to numb and I started having panic attacks and feeling depressed. I basically felt unfit for modern life.

One day I got off the train, walked a mile up the hill towards the charity’s office, had a massive panic attack midway, burst into tears, and just turned around, got back on the train and never went back. I felt guilty but my boss was very understanding and we came to a mutually agreed resignation. The Call had become so loud that my body could no longer ignore it.

I took anti-depressants, found a Gestalt therapist and over the following year started to find equilibrium again. It felt good to process some of my childhood experiences, to observe my life from a more holistic perspective. I got my energy back and at the same time I discovered permaculture.

This felt like what I had experienced in Gyamrang, in the Annurpurnas but for people like me, Western and born disconnected from natural cycles. It was a living-systems practical philosophy for life and I grasped it tightly with both hands.

We changed our lives from the outside dramatically. We started growing food, we designed and founded a permaculture inspired bakery. We started to derive a huge amount of creative agency from permaculture. The pull towards a regenerative culture was intoxicating. After five years of establishing the Handmade Bakery as a functional worker cooperative we felt compelled to dive deeper into our permaculture life. We bought a tiny olive and almond grove in Catalunya Spain and tried our hand at farming. We lived in a yurt with 2 young sons, no running water, a compost toilet and a sundrenched subsistence livelihood for five years.

yurt life with two small kids

We started to learn all the skills that we witnessed in Nepal. Building from natural materials, animal husbandry, horticulture, and a small-scale manual meeting of our needs. We had volunteers and other families living with us throughout. It was exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure. Our Instagram account looked amazing but we were dirt poor and I still felt somehow disconnected, frazzled and lost despite all the amazing experiences we were having. I blamed my body for getting ill and running out of energy on me when I often crashed. I blamed my mind for not calming the fuck down. I continued to try to meditate regularly and it helped but never transformed me. I sank further into alcohol dependency fuelled by Catalan bar culture and the cheap price of booze.

If permaculture alone wasn’t the answer, if severance from industrial work life and consumer culture wasn’t the answer, if marinating in cheap Spanish wine wasn’t the answer, I was beginning to lose faith in there ever being an answer. Something had to change. I had to reconcile with that hollowness somehow.

After a final few months of ignominious drunkenness, I came to my senses and quit drinking forever. It was really difficult. I was scared to be near a bar. Some of my friends stopped inviting me to hang out. One of them told me they didn’t trust people who don’t drink. It had somewhat of the same effect that those imposed periods of isolation had on me as a child.

Suddenly there was a big absence where alcohol had been. It felt very exposing and raw. My shield had been lowered forever and I had to learn who or what I was without that shield. But there was a profound difference this time. I consciously experienced and engaged with the pull and push of my decision to quit directly. I wrote a long description of my life in ten years if I continued to drink and an alternate reality if I never drank again. The absence no longer felt desolate and hollow but more like I had created a space for something really new to emerge. I knew Why I was doing this. I was finally making friends with myself and through that, I was finally making friends with the world.

That was nearly nine years ago. We continued living in our yurt for a couple more years but Brexit, climate change and Johanna’s need to be back in her home country of Finland and near her elderly parents brought us to this small wooden house I’m sitting in now as I write this. Looking out of the window I see fresh-leaved rowan and birch swaying in the breeze of an oncoming squall and our goats chewing methodically in syncopation with them.

The process of friendship-building with myself was not linear, not smooth, however. I initially used the new influx of energy I derived from sobriety to continue to force change and to do more. More to work out how to earn a living, more to prove that regenerative agriculture could work to myself and the world. The boom and bust of my energy cycles got me as far as Finland in early 2017. It got some garden beds established, some fruit trees planted, some house renovations done, got me some part-time work and then I crashed once and for all. I had six months of being almost bedridden, my body tremoring constantly, my mind a complete fog. I thought I was dying but I was just completely burnt out. Again the Call asking of me what I had been resisting. To stop. To turn deeply inwards. To stop relying on external action to solve my and the world’s problems.

And finally, it began to make sense to me. The avoidance of, and allergenic reaction to, the industrial world. My fitful attempts towards depth, towards the living world towards a life of meaning. The hollowness I had felt from such a young age. They were all just manifestations of the same Call. The Call towards wholeness, towards connection, towards Life. But because I had been taught that the way to solve problems is to act, I had always been trying to resolve this internal dichotomy through external effort and always been making myself sick and confused in the process.

So I began a reverse process by of letting go of trying, letting go of striving, letting go of achieving and letting go of the false discrepancy between inner and outer, between myself and the world. In that process I discovered deep embodiment, nervous system regulation, a profound form of relaxed, accepting, open meditation that simply feels like a natural resting. And now I more and more experience the joy of following life’s easeful impulse within me rather than attempting to create that impulse myself and relying on grit and determination to maintain it.

I got better. I got much more relaxed and open. I began to notice my experience without trying to influence it so much and I began to love my body and my mind as an integral experience of my Self. I began to notice a spontaneous self-regulating wellbeing that continues to deepen and unfold (and hopefully will continue for the rest of my life). I trust my own experience now, when before I so often relied on outside confirmation of what was real or valuable and what wasn’t. I was much more sensitive to outside opinion and validation before. But now I know clearly when my thoughts, feelings and actions are aligned with Life because I’ve learned to check inside myself and discern the felt sensations of coherence or discordance. I still get fatigued, I still get sick, I still get triggered, angry and despairing sometimes but I no longer feel all that as a betrayal or as a failure or as a fault. It simply is and I trust it will pass.

And from that place of natural humanity, without exhausting myself or overwhelming myself, I have trained to be a transpersonal psychology coach, an embodied meditation teacher and a breathwork instructor. I have integrated that inner process of healing with an outer expression through permaculture and coaching. There has been no force or massive effort needed, just a continuous heeding of that Call. It just feels like I am settling more and more into who I am at an existential level. Just finally being my nature, with no great shakes.

I am starting to realise that my role may be to grow one day to be that elder who could have tapped me on the shoulder all those years ago and invited me to step into authenticity and alignment and a more beautiful reality. Could have reassured me that there is another, more real experience of Life beyond industrial culture and that it was a perfectly natural reaction to feel an existential lack in the way most people are living at the moment. We’re sorely missing those elders. Our parents, grandparents and teachers tried their best but so many of them were as lost and disconnected as we were, too busy looking for their own solutions to be wise guides to anybody else.

To discover that I am not wrong or faulty somehow, that I am not unfit for this world, but that I am and always was a welcome participant of the living world is the ultimate relief. To be a part of the movement of people helping to spread that message and to facilitate that embodied realisation is the ultimate reward. Our birthright is no more nor less than to take up that invitation fully embracing our place in the family of things.

I believe the push and pull of the Call are present for all of us for all of our lives. Yet it’s often so quiet a susurration that at first we may miss it altogether in all our busyness, all our manic doing. But it never stops calling, increasingly intensifying the beckoning until one day we have no choice but to stop. Really stop. And deeply listen. Fully heed the wisdom it imparts. And then things get easier, I promise.

Can you hear it?