What does not change is the will to change.

- Charles Olson

Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces describes the archetypal hero’s journey. In it, Campbell distills the wisdom of a collection of myths, folktales, and dreams that spans human history. He breaks it down into a succession of discrete stages. Some of these include: 1) A call to action, which begins the adventure; 2) being transported to an alien environment, where many trials are faced and endured; 3) obtaining some kind of boon, which may or may not have been the apparent goal at the start; 4) struggling back to the world from which the hero came, boon intact; and 5) delivering the boon to the world, a treasure which the hero could not obtained without enduring every step of the journey. Through his struggles, the hero is transformed from an ordinary person into something larger. (For more details, see the Wikipedia discussion of Campbell’s book.)

This story is played out in every action /adventure movie ever shown, and it is also played out in our own lives. I believe most of us are on the hero’s path. Through illness, injury, loss, misfortune, love, or merely the desire to take the risks necessary to grow, we find ourselves in an alien place, struggling with unknown forces, meeting allies and enemies, guides and tempters. We stumble and fall, lose our way, endure defeat, experience despair, but if we push on, eventually we celebrate triumphs. And through it all, we emerge transformed. Regardless of whether our external goals are achieved, our internal growth can never be lost.

What seems to differentiate those who triumph from those who are defeated is that those who make it through at some point see the purpose of their mission and embrace it. In time, they are able to envision their destination and map the course of their journey. They learn to keep the vision in sight, no matter how dark things get. It is their North Star. How do they do this? There is a grade-school riddle that asks: “What is the most powerful nation in the world?” And answers: “The Imagi-nation.”

One way I help my clients traverse their hero’s journeys is to ask what solution-focused therapists call the “Miracle Question.” It goes like this:

Imagine that after you finish reading this post you go off and do whatever you do with the rest of the day. Tonight, you fall asleep. And while you’re snoozing, a strange thing happens. The strange thing is that… a miracle occurs! The miracle is a very special one, tailored just to you. The miracle is that all your problems are solved and all your concerns are gone. Poof! But the thing is, the miracle happened while you were asleep, so you don’t know anything about it. When you wake up tomorrow, you are solidly in the world of the miracle, but initially you are unaware that it has occurred. So the initial question is: Tomorrow morning, when you wake up and as you step through the day, what do you notice — in yourself, in your surroundings, in other people — that eventually gets you scratching your head, thinking, “Something’s different about today. A miracle must have happened!”

Some questions to ask yourself, after asking the Miracle Question:

How do I feel when I open my eyes?
Am I in the same bedroom? The same house? With the same people?
What’s different as I get ready for the day?
What’s different as I walk through it, hour by hour?
What do other people in my life notice about me that’s different?
What do I notice about them?

From the answers to these questions, a vision of life with all the problems solved is built. Then it’s just a matter of working toward that “miracle,” one doable step at a time.

Asking yourself the Miracle Question is akin to the call to adventure on the hero’s journey. It will take you into new territory, and there you will encounter struggles you might not otherwise have had to endure. But it is also the first step to finding your personal boon, and to making your miracle your reality.

What will you notice tomorrow, when you find yourself in your miracle world?

The Wikipedia defines a flywheel as “a rotating disc used as a storage device for kinetic energy.” Flywheels are primarily used to maintain steady movement when the power that rotates them fluctuates, as in a potter’s wheel or a piston-based engine.

Vehicles need flywheels in order to keep their engines from moving in a jerky fashion. Potter’s wheels need flywheels to ensure that the rotation of the wheel remains constant. And most of us need flywheels for basically the same reason — to even out the vibration, to keep the forward motion constant.

A lot of what I do as a therapist is to help people to find their flywheels.

By “to find their flywheels,” I mean to discover an interest or passion that they do just for themselves, something that is not part of a job, a chore, or that they do for friends or family, or that is dependent on time or season. A personal flywheel is something that, when you apply even intermittent energy to it, keeps on going in a steady sort of way. When other aspects of your life take a hit, the flywheel keeps the engine turning.

A personal flywheel can be almost anything you feel passionate about and connected to. For some people, it is a spiritual connection and the activities associated with it, whether they be participating in a religious community or in their own private rituals and observations. For others, it is a physical activity — working out, doing yoga, playing a sport not for the sake of competing, but for its own sake. Outdoor activities like gardening, hiking, boating, or fishing also may fill that role.

For many, artistic activities are their flywheels. In my own case, writing and photography have been flywheels for much of my adult life. These activities are things my attention goes to whenever there is nothing else pressing, as if in the back of my mind a miniaturized, but very heavy, potter’s wheel is spinning, spinning, and all I have to do is give it a little kick to keep up the momentum. When other areas of my life flag — health, relationships, work, and so on — I tend to pour a little more energy into my creative endeavors, as the energy of the flywheel needs to keep the rest of the engine going for a while. If I’m busy with other things, I may not be able to put as much into my flywheel activities, but the momentum from past efforts keeps it moving over these rough spots, until I get a chance to give it another kick.

What’s your personal flywheel?

Another Train…

Recently, the song “Another Train,” by British balladeer Pete Morton, has been going through my head repeatedly, particularly the chorus:

“There’s another train, there always is. Maybe the next one is yours, step up and climb aboard… another train.”

I’ve always liked this song — its optimism about not only second chances, but third and fourth and fifth… a sequence of chances to get on another train if you’ve missed the one you thought you needed. The song seemed prophetic when I heard it on the radio the morning I was scheduled to see a client who had lost many things — his business, his health, his savings, many of his important relationships. I’d been working with him to find a new direction, and, through a variant of the “miracle question” exercise , we’d discovered that his internal flywheel, the thing that kept him going when the going was tough, was reading train magazines. Though it was probably a year before he’d even mentioned trains to me, he knew more about railroads than any person I can imagine who was not a historian of the subject. He’d been fascinated by them since boyhood and had never let up in his studies. His “next train” could, we realized, literally be a train or, more precisely, a job on the railroad.

After this realization, my client spent months trying to make connections with people in the railroad business. Several people he knew had some kind of rail transportation in their background — commuter rail, Amtrak, the subway system, marine rail. He pursued these connections.

More time passed, and gradually his enthusiasm began to wane. He grew despondent. Then a call to come for an interview came — when he was 2000 miles away, dealing with an ailing sibling. Had he blown his only chance? Had he missed his train — again? Was this whole idea of starting out in the railroad, in the midst of middle age, just a foolish pipedream?

I gave him a copy of the lyrics to “Another Train.” I talked about my own second chances, and those of friends and clients I have known. We brainstormed additional ways he could find his way into the railroad system. He left the session somewhat heartened, tentatively acknowledging that maybe “there’s another train, there always is,” and perhaps the next one could be his.

The following morning, I came into my office to a message from this client. He had, he said, good news. The railroad had called two hours after our session, and he was getting an interview for an available position the following week! When I saw him today, he said the interview went well, and he thought he had a good shot at the job. But he also had a backup plan, just in case. You guessed it — another train job for another railroad.

I’ve started to see that second chances are everywhere. In Hollywood, for instance, actors seem to be in every film that opens for a few years, and then many of them disappear, only to arrive on the scene some years later for another run. John Travolta and Jon Voigt come to mind, but there are many others. Their initial trains went off on a siding, but eventually another train came along, and they stepped up and climbed aboard.

In my own life, I’ve come to see the value of the “Another Train” philosophy. I now see losses not so much as tragedies but as unexpected forks in the road. Relationships, jobs, other “lost” opportunities are also opportunities, one door closing so another one can open. Photography disappeared for 20 years, but when I picked up a camera again it returned with freshness and vibrancy. Writing has come and gone many times. I have a strong fathering instinct, but have no children of my own. That fathering instinct, however, has come into play many times with the clients I work with, many of whom need a kind of re-parenting. The next train for them is me, the good parent figure. The next train for me is them, the child — often in an adult’s body — who needs a good father.

Loss, now, is followed by a period of mourning for what was lost and for what I imagined would be yet to come, and then by an absence of regret. There’s another train, I tell myself. And, in one form or another, there always is.

What inspires you to get up and climb aboard? When, in your life, have you found another train?

This post is about the transformative power of the spiritual imagination.

A couple of years ago, I was stricken with a gastrointestinal bleed. By the time it was identified, I had already lost about two pints of blood, and I was also rapidly losing weight. Fourteen years before, a similar scenario had brought me within minutes of death. The present situation seemed serious to my physician and gastroenterologist and frightening to me. I underwent a battery of tests, beginning with simple ones — testing for occult blood, measuring hemoglobin and hematocrit counts — and, as the bleeding continued, endoscopy, colonoscopy, and an abdominal ultrasound.

Much to my surprise, the gastroenterologist had never mentioned the relatively benign explanations my physician had offered for my still-undiagnosed problem (bleeding polyp, anal fissure, hemorrhoids), and instead cited more serious conditions, a set of “C’s” including Celiac disease, colitis, Crohn’s disease, and the Big C, cancer. As each round of tests ruled out one set of damaged organs and by implication ruled in the remaining set, the problem area eventually narrowed to my small intestine, which could only be imaged, without surgery, by my swallowing a small camera known as a PillCam. The PillCam procedure required insurance company approval, and that took ten days.

Ten days is a long time to wait when you are bleeding internally.

In the interim, I found myself feverishly scanning the Internet for information on all the illnesses my gastroenterologist had mentioned, and for any other maladies that could explain my symptoms. Nothing I found was simple or likely to get better by itself. I fantasized about a repeat of the botched surgery I had undergone following my 1993 bleeding incident, imagined fatal outcomes, feared the unknown.

And then, with the help of a Buddhist friend’s intervention and an act of Imagination, I stopped fretting.

My friend e-mailed me a Buddhist verse on using wisdom and courage to deal with acceptance of sickness. It’s intention is to help us regard sickness, health, long life or early death as, equally, gifts from the Universe, all to be welcomed equally, all to be transmuted into service to other sentient beings. It is described as a way to transform suffering into enlightenment. Here it is:

I rely on you, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas,
Until I achieve enlightenment.
Please grant me enough wisdom and courage to be free from delusion.

If I am supposed to get sick, let me get sick,
And I’ll be happy.
May this sickness purify my negative karma
And the sickness of all sentient beings.

If I am supposed to be healed, let all my sickness and confusion be healed,
And I’ll be happy.
May all sentient beings be healed
And filled with happiness.

If I am supposed to die, let me die,
and I’ll be happy.
May all the delusion
And the causes of suffering beings die.

If I am supposed to live a long life, let me live a long life,
And I’ll be happy.
May my life be meaningful
In service to sentient beings.

If my life is to be cut short, let it be cut short,
And I’ll be happy.
May I and all others be free
From attachment and aversion.</quote>
 
The exhortation that introduced this verse instructed me to read it many times a day. I did so, and each time its effect was calming. The continued readings also had a cumulative effect. I stopped looking things up on the Internet. I returned to my work as a therapist. I began to make art again, a practice that has, for years, been soothing and healing. And I began to have a different relationship with time. “Whatever it is,” I found myself thinking about the damaged parts of my innards, “it’s already there.”

Whether I would live or die; whether I would get better by myself, with dramatic interventions, or not at all, was already out there in my future. Just as my diagnosis was out there, waiting for me to arrive, so was the impact of whatever they would find. I didn’t have to fret. I didn’t have to plan. I just had to move forward in time, until I arrived at the moment when my course of action was clear, and then move forward from there.

The idea that “it’s already there” has, since, become more general. When I think about relationships, the fates of people I love, the trajectory of my career as an artist or therapist, I am relaxed by the thought that it, too, is already there — that the seeds have been planted, the tendrils that will become the plants that will become the fields of flowers are already sprouting somewhere in the future, and that in that future they have already either found the nourishment they need, or the have not, and that in either case we will all arrive at our future and continue from there.

This is not pre-destination. This is not resignation to my fate. This is not just “que sera, sera.” This is something that, while I can’t fully explain it, feels like the most liberating realization I have ever had. It’s already there. I don’t need to fret about it. I don’t need to fuss and plan and push. I just need to live my life to the best of my ability, and, of the infinite possible futures, I will inevitably arrive at the one that is mine.

I can handle that.

Anxiety has, for me, always been about fearing what will be. Or, more precisely, it’s about the fear that I won’t be able to handle what is around the next bend. And I still get anxious about this kind of thing. But since this “already there” realization, I often catch myself fretting and, instead, give myself a kind of grace. The grace that whatever situation I will encounter, I will handle. That I do not need to prepare for it. That I need, instead, to trust that when the moment arrives, I will be ready, as, by virtue of the fact that I am still standing, I must have been ready for everything that has come before. It’s already there. It really is. All I have to do is keep putting one virtual foot in front of the other and I will arrive.

I already have.