Spiritual Crowd Surfing...

I heard someone say this the other day and it just landed for me.  This phrase could be used to explain who I used to be...I was lost.  I was seeking. I kept finding things to turn my will and life over to but they were never great ideas.  I was spiritual crowd surfing.  Just allowing myself to be lifted up by whatever crowd I was in, and then carried.  Truth? I was dropped a lot.

I don’t blame me.  I mean I was looking, seeking, hungering for some connection.  I think that is the thing with all addicts.  We do not feel connected.  We feel isolated and alone.  We feel lost to ourselves first, then to everyone else.  Then we set about a course of conduct where we keep turning ourselves over to someone, something but lack a real ability to commit and follow through...so we give up and try again somewhere else, with someone else.  Always thinking it was the place, the person, the thing that was wrong, instead of correctly identifying that we were what was wrong all along.  And by wrong I don’t mean that we are bad people, just wrong in our assessment of our abilities, intentions and capacities.  We get it wrong early on, then we persist in getting it wrong over and over and over again.

For me, I can see exactly where and who I was when I began to spiritually crowd surf.  I was 10.  We had just moved from Kansas to Alexandria, Virginia.  The kids were so much more sophisticated, and there was so much more money and I just didn’t know how to cope.  I thought if I got the outside stuff that all the other kids had, then I would be ok.  I got those outside things, but I was still not ok...and that is when I began to thrust myself up and into the crowds praying, quite literally, that they would carry me forward, make me complete, make me feel whole.

And they all did, for a little while.  But no matter if the crowd was a friend group, a club, a sport, a guy, they all failed me eventually.  Or I think more accurately, I perceived a failure in them and then I left.  That is usually how it went.  I am not sure how much all those people really failed me.  When I look back now, I see that my expectations of others and of myself were way beyond human scale.  They were set to Hollywood movie standards, and so far in this life, my life has never once lived up to that standard.  But I still use it sometimes to my immediate dismay.

I began a spiritual quest at 10.  I tried reading the bible.  I didn’t like it.  It didn’t speak to me.  I just made me feel bad, all the time.  I went to churches, all kinds of different ones.  I went to a synagogue but, not unlike the churches, I just didn’t feel like I fit in there either.  I think it was in my sophomore year that I was introduced to Buddhism.  And for whatever reason, that resonated with me.  And again, looking back now, I think it resonated because it was simple, direct and accessible to me on a private and intimate level.  Back in 1983 in Panama there was no online culture, there was no place to go to practice Buddhism, so I began to read and teach myself. I meditated alone.  And I can see now that being able to access a spirituality on a private and intimate level, saved me and further propagated the idea being alone could ever provide me connection.

The three jewels of Buddhism are the Buddha (the guy who achieved enlightenment), the Dharma (Buddha’s teachings) and the Sangha (the community of people to practice with).  I missed this last crucial piece for a very long time.  I had the Buddha and the Dharma, for sure. But I did not want or really seek a community of people who were interested in developing in the same manner as I was.  I wanted to do it alone, but I wanted that aloneness to provide me the comfort and safety of connection with others.  I felt connected to a faith, but other people?  Not so much.

So I returned to my already in progress insanity of trying to find connection with others by practicing disconnection.  And it persists to this day.  I am at a place now where I am on the verge of something.  I don’t know if it a breakthrough or breakdown.  I don’t know if I will be able to make the connections I seek or if I will just give up trying.  I do know that perhaps, for me, spiritual crowd surfing is always going to end badly.  Perhaps it is just time to stop.  I have my faith.  I have my belief system.  And now I actually have a community I practice that faith with on a daily basis.  Of course, I was just contemplating quitting going to meditation with the group yesterday...fuck if that idea that disconnection will bring connection isn’t pervasive and persistent!  

I no longer seek to turn my will and life over to others.  I know who I am, I know where I am broken and bent and deficient. I know, fuck, do I know.  But what I don’t know is how much I have gained by this practice of spiritual crowd surfing.  I don’t know how much of that has gotten me to this point right here.  And I like where I am right now.  I’m content in this here and now.  And perhaps I would have never gotten to this place, if it weren’t for all the spiritual crowd surfing I have done in this life!  So perhaps it is my task to do some more, or perhaps, it is time I stopped and just went with what I know.  I don’t know, and that is clear if you look at the way I have lived my life...I clearly have not a fucking clue what I am doing, but, it all works out pretty well, in spite of me and all my dysfunction.

Again, still...