InnerVentures

Category: Articles by me

  • Sketches of a 1950s Childhood

    The following is an excerpt from the book I am currently writing titled: It’s Been A Long Time Coming

    Rooks nesting in the elm trees soar in the wind above me as I roam freely round the farm. My Dad reaches me across the fields as he whistles his favourite tunes while he works. There is the familiar sound of a steam train puffing past two fields away, as they do half a dozen times a day, answering the sign to “whistle” as they shoot under the road bridge to warn the next station of their imminent arrival. Sometimes my sister and I walk or cycle down our lane, out onto the road and a short way along so we can stand on the bridge to watch a train go shooting past under our feet. Clouds of steam and coal smoke stinging our noses with its pungent smell.

    A chicken that my dad dispatched with his farmer’s efficient dispassion, hangs by its feet in our pantry. My mum takes it down and sits outside the backdoor to pluck it.  She tells me how she doesn’t like handling feathery things and hates this job, though it has to be done. Then I watch with fascination as she guts it, plunging her bare hand inside its back end and explaining the innards to my enquiring mind. All the preparations for a Sunday roast. 

    Saliva flows in my mouth as the sweet smell of Mum’s cooking wafts through the kitchen door to where I sit on the hall floor with paper and pencils drawing horses. I am obsessed with horses, trying to draw them mostly; repeating my attempts over and over to try to capture their elegant and graceful shapes. Never quite feeling satisfied with what is a very difficult subject for a child artist. But it keeps me absorbed for a good many hours on rainy days. 

    I love assembling round the family table to eat the produce from our land, with laughter that turns order and formality into family fun. We visit our grandparents often. Pop Swat, as we call him, never speaks much. He sits in his armchair with a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, while Nona (she didn’t like being called grandma), will be busy in the kitchen until we all sit down to eat roast beef with vegetables from her kitchen garden. Even the horseradish sauce is homemade from the roots she has dug up, washed and prepared before we arrived. Her leathery hands and dirty fingernails are proof of her many hours in her beloved garden. A farmer’s daughter, she always seems healthy and strong, her cheeks flushed and her forehead tanned from hours in the fresh air. Every time we visit there seems to be some new treat in stall for us. Fresh picked peas in their pods, or strawberries in season or hot fruit pie and custard, with apples from her Bramley tree.

      I am sculpting tunnels and hills in my sandpit; the innocent joy of absorption as imaginary worlds unfold in every moment of play. I surround myself with toys on my bedroom floor, and with a bit of input from Mum, my sister and I play monopoly or card games like cribbage, that our other granny taught us. But more than anything I love to create dens built in ditches or hedges, for hiding from grown-ups or other imaginary threats; spying from my treehouse in the secret shady boughs of the yew tree that oversees the vegetable garden. 

    All this held in nature’s generous tapestry or in the holding boundary of our home. Even those boredom times when nothing captures my interest..

    I remember cycling to the country village with sixpence in my pocket for those colourful sweets stored in big glass jars on high shelves above the soup tins and cigarettes. The impossible choice whether to risk something new or to stick with penny chews and sherbet lemons that are my favourites. Sugary treats all served with patience by the aproned lady behind the wooden counter.

    Tottering about on Christmas roller skates with my sister. Laughter and bruises. Taking her for granted as my mentor and sometimes my tormentor too. She is willing and kind towards her younger brother, but sometimes I do test her patience so that games turn into arguments or occasional tussles over the ownership of toys; but nothing serious that our mother can’t help us resolve.   

    Stormy nights with rain spattering the glass and wind that creeps through the leaky casement windows, shifting the curtains to raise my fears of the dark where danger lurks, driving me deeper under the weight and safety of those all woollen blankets in my own familiar bed next to the paper-patterned wall.

    And when sleep won’t come the grandfather clock in the hall cuts the stillness of those lonely small hours with its quarterly call for attention, groaning its tired mechanism to life with chimes that reach up the stairs, counting my family safely through the night.

    My sister and I spend hours playing in the small river that borders our farm; not that it seems small to us. Being born a Pisces fish, water is my element and I can lose myself for hours, building pebble dams in the shallows, fishing with jam jars for sticklebacks or floating the raft I made with two oil drums and some wooden planks.     

    I often wake early to the sound of Dad banging the back door shut for the first milking of the day. Cows wait their turn in line, swollen udders bulge and swing as they shuffle into place for their twice daily routine. I dress myself and go out to move among them with confidence, dwarfed by their gentle heaving shapes; steam rising in the early morning air; hot grassy breath spilling from their wet noses.

    I am standing quietly in the corner of one of the cow sheds watching the birth of new life as my dad hauls on two slimy legs that are sticking out of the back end of a very fat cow. I am in mild shock as he pulls and sends verbal encouragement to the mum. A limp body slowly emerges and then flops on to the soft straw in a heap. My Dad pokes a strand of straw up its nostrils and what seemed inert miraculously comes to life with a jerk. We stand back as the mother turns instinctively to lick and massage her calf. Within a few minutes the newborn struggles up onto its spindly legs and lurches forward looking for a teat for its first drink of colostrum. 

    My feelings turn from disgust to wonder, witnessing the start of a new cycle of life, something timeless, universal and yet so intimate. It’s an early taste of what will be a pivotal point in my life when my own daughter is born, twenty five years later. Not much is said. My Dad is relieved at the safe arrival of the new calf and happy that his job is done. It’s all part of farm work and the farming year, which I take for granted on one level, as it is the only reality I know. 

    Ruth, a friend of our Mum’s, lives in a cottage up the road. She and mum met at teacher training college and having no children of her own, Ruth invites us to visit for the day sometimes. I sense her mystical nature, she is creative and artistic, introducing us to things beyond the world I know at home. 

    One birthday she gives me a little homemade booklet depicting the story of St Francis in words and pictures she has put together herself out of her own love for the saint. This is my first conscious memory of connecting religion and the sacred with nature. I find it very inspiring and have kept the booklet all through my life as a treasured memento of how Ruth opened me to the divine.

    There were other things Ruth taught me, and I don’t know if she ever realised how much she influenced my early development. When she discovered I was crazy about boats, (more on this later) she gave me a stamp collection, comprising two meticulously presented albums that she had inherited from her uncle. He had been a sailor in the merchant navy and had specialised in stamps depicting ships and sailing boats, mostly from Caribbean Islands, Cape Verde,  Mauritius; the exotic places he had travelled to, no doubt. I loved these little images of beautiful schooners and other merchant ships in full sail. So exciting and romantic to my young mind. 

    When I was in my early teens Ruth gave me a thick hardback volume she must have found second hand; five hundred pages depicting traditional art and crafts from all the countries of Asia. What a gift! I fell in love with oriental art and particularly Japanese woodcut prints which I would later study in more depth at art college. Recalling all this now, I am realising Ruth’s generosity and foresight. She was always poor of pocket and poor in health, humble in her wisdom, an amateur astrologer, primary school teacher, nature lover, hedge-witch in the best sense of the word, spiritually imbued and a good friend to my mother, who loved to be stretched by Ruth’s depth and wisdom, but who could never quite hold those qualities in her own being. 

    I feel very sad looking back that I rarely visited Ruth in my adult years. I never showed her the appreciation she deserved before hearing one day from mum that she had died and it was too late to let her know how much she had gifted me. One of many regrets that I began to see as I got older and more aware of my shortcomings. I have my explanation for becoming numb and disconnected when I had to live through experiences which blunted my ability to empathise and express gratitude for the gifts of those early years.

    So many early experiences that wove my childhood world together with stitches of safety and security, but then suddenly was whisked from under me to become just memories; images in my mind that I sought to cling to from far away at english boarding school where feelings were out of bounds and homesickness was a thing of shame to hide and struggle through in silent misery…..

  • Filling The Hole – by Ardhan Swatridge, Nov 2022

    Filling The Hole – by Ardhan Swatridge, Nov 2022

    “We spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy.  It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.”

    Robin Kimmerer from her book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’

    Entering this world as a new born, we are squeezed down our mother’s birth canal to arrive, as if through a portal, into a shockingly foreign environment at the start of a relentless journey towards individuation.  True individuation can take many years, even given an ideal childhood. Yet individuation is only a stage towards reaching another reality and discovering a deeper truth about ourselves.

    Our arrival into the world involves something so challenging, because I believe that where we had just come from is an ocean of universal consciousness in which we enjoyed what has been termed  ‘oceanic bliss’. Of course we don’t normally have any memory of this, just as we don’t have conscious memory of the birthing process we went through either, because, for most of us, the process of growing up is a process of forgetting where we have come from while learning to adapt to and negotiate the physical dualistic realities of human life. 

    So what about this so-called bliss state which I am proposing is from where we have come, and how can I assert this? I’ve read about it in books. I learned the term ‘oceanic bliss’ during my training in Psychosynthesis (Psychology with a Soul). It is conveyed in the deep spiritual traditions of the East and, more personally, I have a subtle knowing which sits mysteriously somewhere inside me,  like a bodily knowing. I am not alone in this. I meet people who speak of an innate knowing about where they have come from, and parents, especially mothers, can witness something of this looking into the eyes of their newborn babies. My experience of this, as father of my newborn daughter, moved me to tears in a way that defies words to describe or explain it. 

    I am proposing this here, because I experience it myself; that the loss of this state of oceanic bliss is huge and painful. It leaves a hole; a hole of deep longing and disconnection that is begging to be filled. But first we have our mother connection, whose love and constant care postpones the loss of oneness we come in with. We are symbiotic at first, while she provides all our needs, enabling us to make the transition into human life bearable through this vital relationship of co-dependency. 

    But as we start to separate from our mother and learn about ourselves as individuals, this sense of a hole inside us, which causes feelings of loss, aloneness and even alienation, can begin to impact our lives. A kind of existential loneliness which we are very unlikely to have cognitive awareness of,  because it operates at such a core level of our being. The writer and teacher Lissa Rankin MD describes this feeling of loss or lack as ‘The God Hole’.  I knew it so well and know it still.

    It is a hole I have tried to fill in so many different ways; with practical activities and achievements, with new material things – clothes or gadgets, for example, – with friendships, with sex, with food and other forms of nourishment, with less wholesome things like drugs, alcohol and gambling. Most of us are caught up in this hamster wheel in some way or another, and all of these activities are subject to becoming addictions in our desperation to fill that hole and stop the pain that emanates from it. Dr. Gabor Mate, a leading specialist who works with trauma and addiction, uses the description for addictive behaviour as ‘Ritualised Compulsive Comfort Seeking’, which is a more compassionate way of describing our strategies for survival in the face of painful distress.

    The hole is not a physical thing, of course. It cannot be found in the body, or detected on a scan.   It may be experienced more as a restlessness, an itch that cannot be scratched, a longing that is described so powerfully in the many writings of the 13th century poet Rumi.  It accounts for the growth of our society’s need and dependence on material comforts. It is a vulnerability that  marketing experts and advertisers have exploited with ever greater sophistication, to persuade us into believing that if we just buy this one special thing, all our hopes and desires will be met. Shiny objects that are dangled in front of us, trying to convince us that finally, at last, our hole will be properly filled and life will become more meaningful than we could ever hope for. I am also proposing here that this hole and its effects on us, account for the ubiquitous levels of stress, depression and mental disorders that are a phenomenon of modern society.   

    If we are lucky enough or learn enough wisdom through life experience, and after all other avenues have been explored, our searches can lead us to a realisation that this nagging sense of loss, this yearning and longing can only be met and eased at a spiritual level, by connection to source; by reconnecting with The ‘Ground of Being’, with God and God’s love – all of which are also ways of describing that universal consciousness we were experiencing before we began this life. I have been studying and learning about this for 30 years on a winding spiritual path, yet only now am I working seriously to shed the more stubborn onion layers of my dysfunctional ego-structure, to gently dissolve the numbing and the armouring I built around me, for safety in my early years, so I can stop trying to fill my hole in all the wrong ways. 

    Only in this way – and this is important – can we get to experience unconditional love. It is what we wanted and needed all along. It is what we expected from our mother, but could never quite get, because our mothers are humans too, with all their personal wounds and limitations, their anxiety, their loneliness – their own separation from source, preoccupied and tortured by their own ‘God hole’. 

    What I mistakenly felt all these years to be a hole or lack within my individual bag of skin, is actually not a hole but the vastness of pure awareness in which we are all held, like the sky of limitless space in which clouds come and go, storms happen, our sun, moon and all the planets are constantly moving.  We think we are objects within that space, constantly changing. But our true nature is the space itself, which is pure awareness, not a ‘thing’ at all. It is no-thing and yet everything. It is constant, outside of time and in that sense we are not born and we never die.  

    Is this too much to grasp? In some ways it is laughably simple. It is our ego mind that clouds the truth. This has been my endeavour, which according to my own cosmology is my journey ‘from mother to Mother’. As I describe it here, it is actually from Source, to mother with a small ‘m’ and on to The Great Mother Goddess, Gaia Sofia – The sacred feminine who is the source of all life. To put it yet another way, from Ocean and back to Ocean. It is my personal endeavour in search of freedom. A journey that can take lifetimes or no time at all. It is not a journey towards anywhere, because it is already who we are when our ego is allowed to loosen its relentless need for grasping and rejecting, for separating and naming. I’ll say it again to help my True Self: Our ego is not who we truly are. 

    When there is no longer a seer but only seeing, our ‘hole’ is full-filled and we become free. But of course we have to consider ‘The Pre-Trans Trap’, coined by Ken Wilbur and very relevant to the above. But I will leave that to a future post.

  • Ode to Persimmon – 12/2020

    What fruits mature in the dormant depths of winter?
    What fruits when ripe, so deliciously plump, so wantonly juiced and sweet, offer so much edible pleasure?

    The persimmon.

    Wikipedia has this dry botanical description:
    Latin: ‘Diospyrus Kaki’. Diospyros is in the family Ebenaceae, The word Diospyros comes from the ancient Greek words “dios” (δῐος) and “pyron” (πῡρον). A popular etymology construed this as “divine fruit”, or as meaning “wheat of Zeus”[2] or “God’s pear” and “Jove’s fire”.

    OK this tells me something but not what I want you, the reader, to know about the persimmons on our land.
    Known locally as ‘Kaki’ fruit, they hang, pendulous, on naked branches fit to break under their combined weight; while our one small tree’s yellowed leaves lie lifeless in the dirt below.
    Like baubles on a Christmas tree, these orange beauties shine in the wintry light. Their thin flesh-like skins turning slowly to a translucent pink as they become sugar-ripe ready to eat .

    Cut free after long months of gestation, this first bright ball of temptation sits softly in my hand. Saliva flows free in my mouth in lustful anticipation of the orgy of taste to come, and then my teeth puncture that oh so delicate skin to release its sensuous flesh within. The honeyed sweetness delights my tongue and the gloopy syrup drips dangerously into my beard as I slurp greedily, drinking it down before it collapses in my stickied fingers.

    I could cut it into tidy pieces and eat it slowly, spooning in slow seduction. But persimmon makes demands on my passion for something more basic, more instinctive, more urgent.

    The juicy flesh goes right to the centre – no pips, no core, just pure gelatinous joy of excess guilt-free pleasure waiting to be gorged with open mouth. This temptress of the taste-buds, this queen of fleshiness, beacon of brazen colour, ripened by the low sun of autumn and softened by the chill of dark November nights.

    As the ‘Kaki’ season starts I find myself impatient to relive that first moment of pleasure. But it is a bitter mistake to tackle the fruit too early. The unripe fruit resists the knife and as you take that first bite into too firm flesh, the flavour quickly turns to bitter distaste. The mouth recoils in a furred pucker, the teeth become rough and the tongue sticks to the roof of the mouth. The reflex is to spit. Tannins, similar to unripe rhubarb, have yet to be converted to fruit sugar.

    So patience pays. Better to watch and wait till the fruit gains that pinker sheen on the skin. Cut one carefully from the branch and bring it in doors to let house-warmth bring it to fruition, in full readiness of the sweet sensual pleasure of that first oral assault on that ‘fruit of the Gods’.

    As the ‘Kaki’ season starts I find myself impatient to relive that first moment of pleasure. But it is a bitter mistake to tackle the fruit too early. The unripe fruit resists the knife and as you take that first bite into too firm flesh, the flavour quickly turns to bitter distaste. The mouth recoils in a furred pucker, the teeth become rough and the tongue sticks to the roof of the mouth. The reflex is to spit, because tannins, similar to unripe rhubarb, have yet to beconverted to fruit sugSo patience pays. Better to watch and wait till the fruit gains that pinker sheen on the skin. Cut one carefully from the branch and bring it in doors to let house-warmth bring it to fruition, in full readiness of the sweet sensual pleasure of that first oral assault on that ‘fruit of the Gods

  • Boarding School Haircuts

    Whenever I have a haircut, the sensations take me back to one of the more, I could even say most, pleasant memories from boarding school (age 8-12).

    me, captain of cricket age 11.

    I can’t remember how often we were lined up for a haircut. Maybe only once a term. But it became special because it was the ONLY opportunity to receive anything like safe and intimate touch; the gentle tugging of my hair, that felt so similar to the maternal strokes that I associated with being persuaded to drop off to sleep by my mother when I was an infant.

    In reality the hairdresser who came to school seemed physically gross to us. He had one leg shorter than the other, an ugly built-up shoe and an ungainly limping walk.
    But once I was in the seat with my eyes closed, and he set about his impersonal scissor work, I quickly dropped into a sea of dreamy sensuousness that my whole being longed for and missed so much. Imagining perhaps it was my mother’s hands or at least that someone cared for me and was soothing my inner pain.

    We know now just how vital touch is for healthy child development. Safe touch. And this was something so absent and so taboo in my day at an all-boys prep school.
    I believe we all suffered for lack of hands-on care, but it was so normalised that none of us ever spoke of it at the time. We knew we weren’t happy in lots of subtle ways but could never have identified what was so fundamentally lacking.

    Sadly the consequences tend to follow us throughout our adult years.

  • A left-handed Shame Attack

    It might have just been one of a number of ways that staff imposed their authority over school mealtimes, but I remember the day that the spotlight was on me in the most excruciating way.
    In the middle of a typical noisy lunch, with staff members eating at their table raised on a dais at one end of the dining hall, a loud bell sounded and we all reluctantly but dutifully fell into silence.

    From her seat next to her husband, the headmaster’s wife called my name, following it with a rhetorical question, designed to shame: “Swatridge!” – all eyes turn to me in the pregnant silence – “Why are you holding your spoon in your left hand? You know you should be using your right hand to eat with.”

    I remember the initial feeling of panic in that moment. I probably did swap hands just to take the accusing attention away from myself and so everyone could return to their meal. But underneath my embarrassment was something much more authentic. A sense of defiance coming from deep within me, along with an inner voice for which my ten-year-old self may not have had words. But I can express this now as:

    “You can control me and command my compliance in so many ways, but my left-handedness is an intrinsic part of who I am and you are NOT going to take that away from me!”

    I can feel the anger rising in me now, at the injustice of what happened all those years ago. But the fact that it has stayed with me as a significant or even typical and potentially harmful influence on my character, is a useful reminder to stand up and be proud of who I am, rather than hide, the learned pattern that I needed for self-protection, and which became my strategy for survival.

    This was just one of many traumatic moments at boarding school. Traumatic because of the low level of fear that I lived with all the time with no-one to go to for support or advice, as well as the specific moments, like standing outside the headmaster’s office, waiting to be beaten with the cane or the slipper. The waiting being intentional, to prolong the psychological aspects of our punishment.

    me, captain of cricket age 11.

    Of course, there were many aspects of those school years that were moments of triumph and pride in achievement; that were character-building, that were full of fun and pleasure. We learned to focus on the positives to get through our challenges, and it is only years later, in a conscious revisiting of the experiences, that the darker side of those years gradually connects me more and more with the emotional scars that have influenced my adult life in negative ways.

    It is years later, through engaging with these processes that those old defence mechanisms and shame-based limitations can dissolve and fall away, to leave me naked in the authenticity and truth of who I can be.

    It is a journey, long and winding, perhaps with no final destination; but no-one else can walk it for us, and we owe it to ourselves in our search for our unique right to be, for self-belief and for an elusive inner peace.

  • ON SILENCE by Ardhan Swatridge

    Probably the biggest challenge and barrier for any of us to deal with in trying to pursue a spiritual practice is, in our search for some degree of inner peace and self-acceptance, we eventually realise that our restless minds endlessly generate thoughts from which it seems impossible to escape.

    In the early stages of meditation, years ago, I developed the belief that, with practice, I was going to be able to still my mind, empty my thoughts and float in some beatific realm of peaceful silence, from where all my earthly problems, my existential fear and my daily anxieties would all dissolve; at least temporarily.

    Predictably, as I see it now, I soon experienced a lot of frustration in my meditation sessions. Unable to distance myself for more than a few seconds from the tyranny of my thoughts, I tended to think that I was doing it wrong, that I was just not cut out for spiritual practice. And though I have continued to try to honour my commitment to meditation by searching in a number of traditions over the years, sitting with several different teachers to try and find an approach that would work for me, I have to admit that my record of showing up on ‘the cushion’ and my progress as a seeker has been patchy and limited.

    In spite of all this, there is a mystic in my being who lives with such a deep longing to transcend ordinary existence, who longs for and intuits a profound stillness and silence that lies at the heart of everything – the non-dual, interconnected co-arising, the Ground of Being, Emptiness, Oneness. I have read about it and felt the Truth of explanations from all my teachers; (Lama Yeshe, Joanna Macy, Eckhart Tolle, Yogananda, Thich Nhat Hahn, Sri Mooji, Igor Kufayev, Ken Wilbur, Alan Watts and others).

    I can speak of the vast interconnected web of existence that paradoxically is to be experienced within profound stillness and silence, because I have an intellectual understanding of it. Yet between the two poles of rational knowing and intuitive awareness there is a gap; a chasm in fact, so wide and yet paradoxically there is really only a gossamer veil between them.

    That veil, that I experience as a chasm, is created by my ego whose need for total control locks me into his dualistic take on life with fierce determination. Teachers tell us that spiritual awakening necessitates the dissolving of the ego’s hold over our assumed reality, and while this might seem appealing at first, most of us reach a point sooner or later, sooner in my case, where we face huge fear at the prospect of letting go. Who am I without the ego, which is all I know?

    The point here being that we can’t know what it is we are letting go into, or out of. I have undergone a number of trainings and spent many hours in individual therapy to try to resolve my anxieties and limitations at emotional and psychological levels. This has produced some benefits, as I have a much better understanding of my woundings and vulnerabilities that my ego thinks he has to protect, but it has been only partially helpful.

    A Zen practitioner and teacher, whose book I am reading (Zen and Therapy by Manu Bazzano 2017), describes how any path of healing or transformation involves being willing to allow ‘overwhelm’; to allow oneself to become lost. Our egos which protect and control our personality, are created from all the early experiences and influences from our family of origin and from the cultural setting in which we grew up. Nobody has perfect parents, we are all traumatised by these influences to varying degrees and we have the choice to live our lives according to the distortions and limitations that created us, all under the protecting/controlling eye of our ego; or we can search for ways to transcend these limitations. Bazzano calls this the process of ‘emancipation’.

    So where does silence come into all this?

    Before going back to the problem of our mind relentlessly creating thoughts, I just want to acknowledge the issue of silence in relationship to others, where in the main it implies the absence of communication and indeed can be used as a powerful weapon, a refusal to speak one’s truth, for example, which I am regularly guilty of; and yet it can also create a quality of intimacy between two people, when there is no need for talk because both people feel a resonance at a silent energetic level.

    However, in meditation we don’t get far by willing our thoughts to stop, and only a little further by learning to watch them from the equanimitous position of a witness. I was listening to a recent discussion between Gabor Mate and Adyashanti in which Adyashanti explained how he invites people to give up trying to stop their thoughts and to try something much more skilful and effective. This involves proposing a question, in order to avoid the trap of demanding something of the mind, which only serves to reinforce its hold over our focus of attention. He suggests asking ourselves this question:

    “What if I just listen to the part of me that is already quiet?”

    This is indeed skilful. And while I spend so much time at the mercy of my ego’s need to fill any space with something – any activity, sight or sound that creates a sense of novelty; I also know, as I have described above, there is already in all of us our Buddha Nature, the Ground of Being, which was never born and which never dies. This is the universal consciousness that is essentially silent and still, ever-present in the eternal now.

    I have used some terms and phrases here that have become somewhat cliche’d through misappropriation and over-use. But I do not apologise for them. Listening to Adyashanti’s suggestion this morning, as he explained it to Gabor Mate, I realise I need to apply my time on the meditation cushion to ask that question in a process of deep enquiry, while opening to Bazzano’s invitation to ‘lose’ myself to whatever arises in response to that simple question. Will it trick the ego and the thinking mind into taking a back seat? Can I touch into that deeper consciousness that is silent and ever-present?

    I know there is silence within me. When I drop down enough to bring presence to the silence that exists all around me here on the mountainside in Liguria, I love it. I love not having to speak, I love the time away from having to engage with all the drudgery of daily practicalities that dominate most of our lives. I value silence and solitude above everything once I let go of all my distractions and addictions. Silence is a rare commodity in these days of city-living and the business of managing a busy lifestyle in mainstream society, as most people are trying to do.

    To quote Adyashanti again: ‘Silence is not of high cultural value in our society’. But look how much stress and pain results from the effects of modern society. Noise is a destructive pollutant on the planet, along with all the other kinds of pollution, though not so obvious perhaps because of the extent to which we unconsciously adapt as we adjust to living in towns and cities instead of living in nature as we did in the past. I feel so lucky to be in a place where silence is possible and in a position where I have time to give to it.

    Not that the natural world is silent of course. I grew up on a farm, with background noises of mooing cows as they came to be milked twice a day, with the raucous call of rooks nesting in nearby elm trees every spring, with our dog barking at the postman’s van each morning, my father’s tuneful whistling as he went about his chores on the land; on waking in the night, the chiming of our grandfather clock in the hall downstairs and the occasional distinctive sound of an owl calling to it’s mate.

    Maybe to a city dweller the sounds and silence of the countryside are disconcerting or even scary, but these were and continue to be reassuring sounds for me, ‘announcing [my] place in the family of things’ (from Wild Geese by Mary Oliver). Not like the sounds of a city, as I experience them: cars, motorbikes, planes, sirens, factories, piped music. Manmade sounds that jar and offend the ear. Even the subliminal hum of a city experienced in the small hours disturbs me, unlike the silence of the countryside.

    Nature too has its background hum of course; but to me it is the positive hum of nature’s complexity, of inter-being, of the cycles of life, death and renewal, as opposed to that of the linear systems of consumption we humans impose on our struggling planet, producing so much trash and pollution at the end of that line. For me noise is associated with that destructive linear system, whereas Silence goes with the cyclical nature of life.

    I clearly recall that from an early age I would occasionally drop into a kind of silent reverie when I was alone outside. Tuning into the silence within the sounds of nature around me, I found myself becoming still and, sensing a subtle shift, I could experience a kind of merging that was somehow familiar and reassuring. A mystic’s knowing from a previous life? Or a connection to the oceanic bliss of being in my mother’s womb? Who knows.

    I can remember specific occasions when this happened in my childhood, and which left a big impression. But the influence of pragmatic parents and ten years at boarding school ensured that I developed as a logical pragmatist, with the mystic taking a secondary place, less trusted and too sensitive to give shape to my life in a significant way.

    My sense is that most people today have a real fear of Silence. I am not going to analyse that further here, but I do feel deeply sad that this is broadly the case. It says so much that we have to fill any and every space with something, with stuff. I admit to having a struggle combating the influence of sophisticated marketing and the bombardment of information and entertainment that have become ’the weapons of mass distraction’, as one of my teachers is quoted as saying. The media machines are trying to put us to sleep with ‘noise’ and are succeeding brilliantly, helping to keep us in denial about the urgent threat to the planet of Climate Change that we ourselves are creating in our hunger for short-term material pleasure.

    Yet in reaction to the threat of global collapse, the rise and availability of ways to evolve our consciousness through spiritual (as opposed to religious) practice has been exponential, and it continues to grow. Yoga, in its many forms, has become a major force, often providing a way into meditation through embodied practice for thousands of people, bringing with it dietary and health consciousness, ethical awareness and a sense of our interconnectedness; all of which is a force for good and a cause for hope going forward. I cling to the hope that a widespread rise in spiritual values will engender a growing sense of global responsibility and an appetite for real change before it is too late.

    I can’t end this post without including something about by-passing; a dreaded word in spiritual circles. We need to address our emotional baggage just as much as we need to gain spiritual insight. Many teachers tell their students that spiritual practice will also help their emotional woundings and psychological issues. The number of scandals of teachers (often highly evolved ones) abusing their students, is clear evidence that we can become spiritually awake and mature, while remaining emotionally a child, unable to grow up. There is a great danger of lop-sided development as a student of spiritual practice.

    Emancipation, to use Bazzano’s term, involves evolving and growing up at all levels, healing psychologically, maturing emotionally, as well as gaining spiritual insight. The term transcendance can imply bypassing, where it avoids the full embodiment of any of these processes. Embodied Evolution would be my definition of the term emancipation in this context, as it ensures that bypassing does not take place.

    I have been guilty of it. In fact it has been my primary defence in life to use rationalisation, escaping from my body/feelings into my head to rationalise issues away. A strategy to manage fear as a result of early trauma and the pragmatist’s response to the way of the mystic. The power of the thinking mind over the silent knowing of embodied mystical awareness.

    Then there are the levels of denial we use to avoid addressing the grave dangers of our planet in peril; glaring examples of by-passing of course, which is operating throughout western culture, but this is a huge topic to be addressed elsewhere.

    Silence is a jewel of great value. I need to keep reminding myself – or rather my pragmatist self – to make time and space for it, to afford it the importance and value it deserves, and I want to remind the world around me, in the face of terrible odds, that we lose this vital resource at our peril, both individually and globally.

    Silence gets us under the noise of our thoughts to reach a more subtle spacious consciousness, from where we can begin to touch into the rhythms of nature, the still centre of our own being, compassion for others (human and non-human) and even perhaps to the Ultimate Truth of reality.

  • Teenage Trauma of a pretty ‘Bum Boy’.

    Teenage Trauma of a pretty ‘Bum Boy’.

    It has taken me fifty years to reach a point in my life where I feel ready to talk openly about some of my teenage boarding school experiences. Since my late thirties I have tried to address the most painful aspects of those years, seeking therapeutic approaches whenever my life’s challenges seemed to point to my early wounds as their source. But out of denial and a habitual stiff-upper-lip,I have kept my story close to my chest. The psychotherapeutic help I have received has been only partially successful.
    I have recently lowered my armour enough to accept the levels of trauma and shame that I have been carrying from those school years, because whenever I have found myself paralysed with fear and unable to speak out, I failed to see the extent to which my ‘weakness’ as a man, as I saw it, led straight back to the terror of the small boy from my childhood. I have been hard on myself all this time and minimised in my mind, the effect of those school years, through the numbing and dis-association that my system employed to get me through that time, and which became my unconscious response for creating safety when under pressure or threat in my adult life.
    It was skilful means for a small boy, but life limiting for the man ever since.
    I hope by revealing what I have kept hidden from all but my closest partners along the way till now, my account will serve to lighten the load for other men and women who have struggled through their lives with a heavy weight on their shoulders. I do not claim that the challenges I lived through during my school years were worse than those of any others who became victims of abuse, whether mental, emotional or physical. There are thousands of people out there who are carrying burdens much bigger and more damaging than mine. But I offer my story in service to those people, in all walks of life, who are longing to find ways to heal old wounds and make peace with themselves.
    The way it happened to me was like the drip-drip-drip of water on stone:
    I arrived at my secondary boarding school, on the strength of my Common Entrance exam, age thirteen. We were based in a Victorian brick mansion nestling in a large area of woodland a mile and a half away from the main school. At thirteen we were there for just one year before moving permanently up to the main school, although in that first year most of our lessons and other activities involved walking through the woods each morning, and into the village, to reach the school for our daytime studies.
    For the first two months, September and October, we could make the journey back to our night-time base in broad daylight, having our evening meal there and our period of prep before bed. But as the nights drew in, the walk back through the woods in twilight conditions and then in complete darkness, was at best an eerie experience. I remember becoming terrified of this nightly ordeal. I think I had always had a childhood fear of the dark and of dark woods particularly, but I had specific reasons for this being heightened for me, as the days and months passed.
    I had not been at this school long when I became aware of older boys taking an interest in me. These boys were attracted to my soft girl-like features and, being an all-boys school, there were one or two poor souls each year who were picked out as the ‘pretty boys’ to become the focus of all the pubescent testosterone and unexpressed sexual energy raging through the school, which was of course a virtual prison.
    This sexual energy had nowhere to go except towards those of us who were forced to become surrogate females, in service to the relief of that pressure valve in the system. The sexual aspect of this was the dominant factor, for in fact we were known as ‘bum boys’ (a name that still triggers me); but I can see now, that having been separated from our mothers, many of us since the age of eight when we were packed off to our first boarding school, we craved contact with any female energy, and more sinisterly for us ‘pretty boys’, we faced the disowned anger of sons abandoned by their mothers. I can now see how this explains the edginess of the attention I drew towards myself; all that anger wrapped up in the abusive tone of the words used towards and against me, that I had to learn to face and endure on a daily basis, as the designated ‘female’ in our year.
    I found it scary to be noticed by older boys, especially fifth and sixth formers, who seemed like grown men to me. Taunting comments came more regularly from the year above me and gradually, as ‘gorgeous’ became my nickname (virtually everyone had a nickname of some kind), boys in my own year joined in and tended to treat me the same way. I quickly learned not to react, trying to deflect all forms of attention, whether abusive jibes, or more appreciative and harmless ones. Soon it all became a relentless daily nightmare for me, continuing for the next three years, during which time all teachers and staff seemed completely blind to or oblivious of my predicament. I never once tried to seek help from my so-called guardians after two experiences where teachers witnessed sexualised comments towards me and just sniggered knowingly, rather than making some effort to stop what was happening.
    I felt like I was seen only as an objectified female; there for everyone’s pleasure; there to allow a release of everyone’s frustrated sexuality, sexual confusion, along with all the new-found feelings of adolescence that needed to be explored, including their repressed anger towards their mothers; none of which had a legitimate outlet for expression.
    Usually I could tell if boys were just using me to let off steam with no personal attachment to me or to an outcome; for whom this was just a phase they would work through and then move on into a more mature heterosexuality. But I became aware that there were a few boys who showed an interest in me that was more personal and targeted. This could be out of their own neediness, or because they had already secretly identified their permanent homosexual orientation.
    My first experience of this was in my first year when Jones, a boy one year older than me, accosted me in the school grounds, making it clear he liked me and inviting me into the woods with him. He was mildly intimidating, and I was scared, although my memory has become vague about the details. I seem to remember he wrestled me to the ground and started to fondle me, but I must have managed to stop him going further and I got away. He never tried this again, though it was months before my fear of him relaxed, realising Jones had lost interest and moved on.
    For the next four years I held resentment towards him for what he had tried to do, and it showed me how I needed to guard against putting myself at risk in this way. I never knew if Jones was genuinely feeling a sexual attraction to me or whether he was just trying to overcome his own sense of vulnerability by showing off his power and ingratiating himself with his friends, because he had started his ‘hit’ on me in a very public way. A lot of that went on.
    So that painful encounter with Jones, age thirteen, and other particularly personal and threatening verbal exchanges, put me in a constant state of alert for my safety and wellbeing. In my first year, those nightly walks back through the woods, with a minimum of electric lighting to show the way along the path, became an ordeal for me. If I was with class mates I felt safe, so I tried to engineer this each day. But there were evenings, when I had been doing some extra activity, I had to return later than the main body of boys, and so faced the prospect of making the journey alone. I was always terrified that an older boy would follow me, or would be hiding in the bushes, waiting to grab me when I came past.
    Thankfully, nothing serious did happen, but I was never free of the threat of it in my mind. I was being accosted with verbal reminders of who or rather ‘what’ I was in the eyes of the school, many times each day, so I was never allowed to forget I was the fancied ‘gorgeous’ object of attention.
    It was a traumatising time for me, something I have only recently come to accept fully, as I have looked deeply into the damaging effects on my adult life. There was worse to come but first I need to add that there was another side to this coin and other aspects of my circumstances that complicated my overall experience of boarding school. I had already been boarding for five years at my prep school. I had already established that I told my parents virtually nothing of my troubles, only the positives. I was often lonely, I was isolated and I was seriously lacking affection and physical contact. This was the cruel nature of boarding school.
    So given all this, there was an aspect of the attention I was getting which affirmed that I was an attractive person. It was feeding a need in me to be seen, appreciated and liked. A natural and necessary need in all young people. So perversely, I often enjoyed the attention I got; and yet, as with all victims of harassment or abuse, I could not risk showing that I enjoyed it. It was a painful double bind, which only led me to feel more lonely and isolated, trapped by my own fear of what might happen if I encouraged it.
    My fear of being ‘hit on’ homosexually was a drip-feed of torture. In the face of this I returned to the saying that I had adopted earlier as my mantra:
    “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words alone can’t hurt me.”
    This helped to numb the pain, while giving me a childish sense of victory over my situation and over the boys who taunted me. If I avoided physical violence I could appear indifferent. I was able to never show they could get to me, that they couldn’t hurt me with their nicknames and sexualised comments. I must have held fury deep inside that I also withheld from my perpetrators and in the end I paid a big price for my determination to rise above their games. Through my reactions, or lack of them, I was becoming trapped by my own stubbornness and self-righteous pride so that eventually they wanted their revenge. I will come to that.
    The fact is that while my tactics allowed me to look strong and resilient on the outside, I was hurting and often screaming on the inside; living in a state of alertness and fear for my physical and psychological safety. It left me with exhausted adrenal glands which has affected my health in later life. It must have taken its toll on me even then. I found myself slipping behind some of the brighter kids with our academic work, although I did sit and pass 10 ‘0’ levels age sixteen, so in spite of my situation, I not only managed to keep my troubles from my parents, I was able to impress them with my achievements and do justice to the ‘privileged’ education they were affording me. Ironic as it may seem, I was still stuck in the naive belief, that if I didn’t achieve and do well, my parents wouldn’t love me.
    If you, the reader are thinking at this point, “why the hell didn’t you tell your parents and ask to leave? After all you sound way too sensitive a child to be placed in a boarding school environment for ten years.” You would be right, But the fact is it never once occurred to me that I could get help to escape or change my situation. We children didn’t have a sense of our needs and rights in the way that most young people have today.
    Even now I recognise a childlike belief that sits deep in my system and has played out in my life over and over again in negative ways. The belief that I am stuck in the grip of the situation I find myself in, with no right or ability to question or challenge it, however difficult, painful or destructive it is for me. I feel powerless to do anything about it. There seems no point in speaking out or sharing my problems. I just have to silently accept my situation and get on with it, alone, adapting myself around other people, letting them have their way, with no sense of my own power. This belief has kept me tied to people in unhealthy relationships and in one instance, it took a psychotherapist to shock me into action by saying to me: ‘you have to get out of this relationship or you will die!’ It is not difficult to see where this stubborn belief originated, a victim identity that as a mature man, has been a major source of shame.
    My saving grace at school perhaps, was that I showed myself to be a skilled and plucky player on the sports field. In fact my forte was squash and I played for the school at various levels for this as well as for hockey, cricket and tennis, gaining genuine respect and kudos with parents, teachers and the boys around me. In this forum at least, I could prove myself to be a man.
    By the time I got to the fifth form, I realised I was literally the only boy in my year who had an interest in art. This set me apart in yet another way, which was both good and bad. I found peace and solace in the art room, away from the rough and tumble of my peers. I even expressed some of my angst in my paintings and sculptures. I had sensibilities and feminine qualities, which I rarely felt safe enough to express, but here was one of the few places where I had an outlet during those years. It felt wonderful to have my art teacher quietly supporting and affirming my sensitivity and creativity.
    I was invited to get involved with painting scenery for a theatre production, and through this opportunity I discovered a further escape from my lot in mainstream school. I began to spend all my free time behind the stage, and was enrolled as one of the ‘stage staff’. I made new friends there, people who seemed to accept and respect me as a human being instead of seeing me as a sexual object. This was refreshing, comforting and very healing. I was able to start showing myself more, expressing my feelings. I could breathe and share creative time with these people.
    My class mates on the other hand took great exception to my involvement with the stage. In their eyes (probably their parents’ eyes actually) all actors and anyone connected with the theatre were ‘queers and poofs’. In their eyes I had become one of ‘them’ and this confirmed that I was and always had been a faggot, a level up (or down) from just being a ‘pretty boy’. I had by then matured too, my voice had fully broken, and although I still looked young and fresh-faced, other younger boys had arrived at the school to take over from my given role, and become the next generation of ‘bum boys’.
    The upshot of this new dynamic between me, as a member of the stage staff, and the rest of my year, was a vicious period of taunting and bullying. They seemed to resent my success in finding ways to live outside of their control, sidestepping the feminine role they were used to me playing for them. I was feeling safer and strong enough to rebuff their taunts. This only made them more angry and, unbeknown to me, they began to plot a way to teach me a lesson.

    Continued in my post: Sexual Abuse and Trauma Relived – parts one and two.

  • Sexual Abuse & Trauma relived – Part two

    My defences against verbal abuse are strong; walled-off and defended after years of boarding school life, away from the relative safety and protection of family and home. I am numbed, emotionally starved, often lonely and miserable, having been relentlessly taunted and harassed in a sexual way that has reduced me inwardly to a confused, fearful victim, in spite of my personal motto: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words alone can’t hurt me.”

    Somehow my 5th Form peers know that now. They planned a different kind of lesson for my impregnable defences. They conceived a humiliation to break through all my psychological defences to expose the softest, most precious and purest part of me; under the nose of authority, but hidden from its judicial and often conveniently averted eyes. The weeks of ongoing threat became a kind of personal torture.

    So this is how the attack came about. The assault – the rape. I now realise that my lingering terror is not so much about what has actually happened, as about the imposition of power and control over me, my helplessness, my anticipatory fear of what they might next do to me; all in the macabre silence of the dormitory that had, till that moment, given me some sense of nightly security and escape from the clamour of school life with the daily abuse that infected me. Now I am not even feeling safe at night.

    I have learned that it is so often the case that rape is carried out by people close to us and who know us. The very people we might expect and need to trust.

    I sleep very little that night, shivering for hours with fear and after-shocks; hating these boys who lie in their beds around me. Yet I stay silent. Silent in my bed in stubborn refusal to let ‘them’ have the satisfaction of evidencing my pain, of sealing their victory. My old motto now becomes redundant, as I determine to prove to them that even sticks and stones can’t hurt me.

    The figure has power, but is only aware of his vulnerability & shame.

    I know I have to hide my shame above everything. I also decide that I will not report this to my House Master. I will tell no one. I learned years before that you never squeal on your peers. The potential reprisals are just too big to contemplate, and I want to show them my courage, that I can stand up to them on my own.

    The next morning I will get up as usual and carry on as if nothing has happened. I will not even show a sign of resentment, let alone victimised hurt. I will hold my head high and carry my pain so deep inside that this incident will be forgotten within a week and purged from my memory within a month.

    How wrong I am about this!

    Looking back I won’t remember any detail of sleepless nights or nightmares following the attack. I won’t have clear recall of what inner pains I went through. But I will remember continuing as usual the next day and for the rest of that term; and I will find, much to my surprise, that a boil has been burst, the oppressors have taken their pound of flesh, I am seen to have been punished whether I show remorse or not. In the aftermath, I believe I gain their respect for being able to carry on without attempting to report them, without wanting an eye-for-an -eye or a tooth-for-a-tooth, or without breaking down in any outward way.

    I have a renewed yet subtle sense that a benign force greater than I can imagine is lifting me up; has always been there, even in the darkest of times. He or She cannot protect me from experiencing life, but if I could only trust the faith, I will know deep in my heart that I am being held in a loving way, by something universal and ultimately beyond normal comprehension. It is not specifically a Christ figure or a Being of any kind, I will struggle to name it God, but the subtle energy is real, when I look for support and tune into it.

    I have no intention of giving up my links with the Stage Staff and come the following year, as rehearsals for the opera require the leading ladies to arrive on our stage several evenings a week, I will find myself attracting the attention of my first love in the form of Marian, who saves my life, confirms my heterosexuality (though we never actually lose our virginity together), and will provide me with a hugely healing distraction from my past struggles.

    In those last two years of school, I and my classmates will grow into a new level of maturity, creating fresh and positive relationships together, with mutual respect born of the stresses of ‘A’-level studies and the pressures of the much-anticipated university applications, on which our futures will depend. I say ‘we’, but I alone among my peers apply for a place at Art School, attend an interview and am accepted on the basis of my portfolio with the condition of only modest A Level results. This gives me yet another privilege as the stress of revision and exam-sitting begin to loom. Everyone else is having to buckle down to make their A and B passes, while I can relax and enjoy the best of the A level english and history classes with teachers I like, and with plenty of hours free in the Art Department.

    Only much later will I fully acknowledge the trauma of boarding school. Much later will I learn to see how over-forgiving I am by nature, preferring the passive route to any form of outrage that would honour violations of my boundaries and change a lifelong tendency to let others take advantage of me.

    The sun shines and as we move into summer and our final months together at school, I can feel the warm healing strokes of creativity and freedom, that are the hallmarks of Art school life, reaching out to me with the 4 years to come. No rush to throw off the heavy brown school uniform, or to don the colourful t-shirts and loons which become the emblems of my coming-of-age time, 1969 – 1973; with Flower Power, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan. Though actually my more gentle music of taste will be Joni Mitchell, Donovan, the Beach Boys and Crosby Stills Nash & Young.

    In these days and in these ways, I will leave the dark days of school behind, with happy memories of the Sixth Form, of just a few friends from that time, of a first love, of starting to address the complex questions of what it means to be a man in the atomic age, the arrival of feminism, freed from the rules of a dying victorian worldview, with everything new and fresh to look forward to.

    I have learned to detest hypocrisy and yet I will carry the hidden chains of Patriarchy deep inside my system for the rest of my life. The lack of confidence and self-belief that these early influences engender in me will continue to undermine my creativity, my sovereignty and my natural mysticism for many decades to come. I will continue to hide my sensitivity and fear behind a mask learned at school. At age 39, in a psychological training designed to explore and heal personal wounds, I discover two particularly significant facts about myself that will unfold later:

    There is a character in me, who is obsessed with hiding and with safety, who lives by the motto: “I would rather be a blank page than be read and misunderstood!”

    There is another character in me who feels deep empathy with women who have suffered sexually at the hands of masculine abuse, and who also attracts vulnerable women to me, such that they are able to confide in me as a gentle safe man, in order that they can face their demons and learn to trust men again.

    I will continue to distrust men through my adult life and only gradually, in the controlled environments of Men’s Groups and Men’s Rights of Passage, do I address my wounded relationship with men directly.

    This two-part article is one of a number of ways that I am trying to find peace. I have undergone many years of therapy and psychological trainings without getting to the root of my neuroses. Spiritual practice has been a huge support, and I will write about this in other articles, but as yet I am still dominated by the experience of a ‘suffering’ ego. By writing this account of school life, and expressing it in the present tense as a way of reliving the painful experiences of fifty years ago, I hope to finally loosen the grip of the wounds to my emotional self, of my distorted behaviours and of the limitations to my confidence as a man and a healthy human being..

    The material is very personal and intimate, but I have decided to defy my tendency to hide and risk exposing my truth regardless of any consequences. This feels very timely when so many women have been bravely speaking out about sexual abuses they have suffered. The effect is a social movement and cultural shift which is exposing the climate of patriarchal power that has allowed men for far too long to normalise what is totally unacceptable behaviour.

    To close I want to note that we all have an inner rapist, but unless we are prepared to own and make conscious the instincts and emotions surrounding this, we are all at the mercy of the destructive effects of acting out or projecting onto others. Truth telling and awareness-raising are the key to a healthier life, for each of us individually and for society as whole.

  • Sexual Abuse & Trauma relived – the first of a two-part account

    I am settling down in bed, adjusting to the dark, relaxing after my day, and dropping into the beginnings of sleep. Suddenly I hear movement around me as 6 or 8 male figures loom over me, surrounding my bed. I don’t immediately sense danger and It takes me a moment to realise the aggressive energy of intent that is pouring from them. Hot panic floods my body as my protective bedcovers are stripped away and a dozen silent hands lift my pyjama’d body roughly into the air, maybe one at each arm and leg and one each side at my middle. I am frozen with momentary shock and then raw adrenaline triggers my struggle to free my limbs from their grip. I swear at them to leave me alone. They respond with more force, tearing my pyjama bottoms down to expose my privates. Although there are no lights on, they can see my body from a light outside the un-curtained windows. I only see shadowed faces, but I know who they are.

    And then one of them, the leader I guess, starts to handle my private parts pulling on my penis, taunting me with how limp it is, and then pumping it with his fingers as if trying to induce an erection. I will forget his words, although the experience I will never forget. He implies that if I am gay I should be enjoying this. At these words one of the others makes a symbolic gesture of pushing his finger between my buttocks and pressing up my ass. There is no penetration and yet I feel defiled in that moment of absolute victimisation.

    All this probably lasts only a few seconds, but time is standing still for me as I am gripped in a maelstrom of terror and outrage, humiliation and shame – oppressed by the oppressors. Then I feel my body slump back down on the bed and they are gone, away into the shadows. I lie there unmoving and disassociated for several minutes, as my inner heat is cooled by the night air on my stripped naked body. I pull my pyjamas back over me as if to cover my shame in the dark. I feel broken and beaten by the sense of violation and victimisation at the hands of such distorted masculine domination. The visceral sense of being punished for being too sensitive, too artistic, too feminine, is all part of my confusion and pain. I am aware of something deeply life-changing having taken place. But I already start to minimise it out of a desperate need to feel normal again.

    It will take me many years to fully comprehend the extent of this abuse and to honour myself as a sensitive man instead of trying to hide it. It will take me many years before I can share such a traumatic event with a few close friends, and finally to be able to name it as a rape experience, penetration or not.

      I am 16, I am a sensitive adolescent preparing for my ‘O’ level exams in a class of youths who have been making it very clear that they do not like my behaviour and my attitude towards them. The dominant gang among them has decided to punish me, calling me a queer and a puff. I have been attending classes in the face of this oppressive atmosphere for weeks on end. I feel the pain inside and try to hold my head high on the outside. I am used to living this way, refusing to show they can hurt me, but lately they have been expressing their anger and frustration, by calling me self-righteous and cocky. They cannot tolerate difference, sensitivity.

    Bullying, which has always been rife, is the accepted way of expressing this intolerance and is of course, as I learn much later, driven by the projected pain, fear and vulnerability that everyone suffers in this all-male english boarding school. And so it has always been.

    I can only see my side of the situation, after 3 years of living through a particularly invasive and painful kind of verbal abuse. But, this term, I have found an unexpected solution, a partial escape. I will explain: I am not the only artistically inclined student in my year; there are several musicians. But as the sole visual artist, my talent has been acknowledged such that I have been invited to join the ‘stage staff’, as we are known; a team of boys who manage the school’s stage productions: the scenery for plays, the lighting and all the essential processes that go on behind the scenes in the school’s theatre productions. I have been put in charge of designing and painting the sets for the opera Cosi Fan Tutte.

    As a member of the Stage Staff we are allowed to work and hang out in the backstage areas at any time out of school teaching hours. I initially looked up to the other members, who are mainly sixth formers, older and well versed in all the operations of the stage. To my great relief and joy, they have accepted me for who I am as a person, instead of the female sexual object which had become my cross to bear since my first year. Now I have found myself among a more mature group who have accepted me without prejudice and I have quickly gained respect for my contributions, artistically and socially.

    This has been my lucky escape from the tyranny of fifth form life, but also the source of the bullying that’s been building up in the face of my move. My classmates have clearly been angered by my new allegiances, by my disappearances, and the privileges we stage-staffers enjoy.

    In a way they are right to be envious. All of us fifth formers expend hours of time and energy looking for ways to escape the boring routines of school life, the rules and restrictions that frustrate our need to rebel and experiment with life. Many of us smoke behind the bike sheds, funk gym classes and defy the curfew on dark evenings to turn up at the back door of a local pub for illicit bottles of cheap beer. There is an underbelly of rebellious competition that drives us to break rules and get away with all sorts of out-of-bounds activities. Like most teenagers, we need to take risks and pump adrenalin. There are a few leaders and always enough followers willing to join forces, creating a sense of safety in numbers.

    And then suddenly I have been enjoying legitimate freedoms unavailable to the rest of my class. Hence an added source of the anger and rejection displayed by my peers. I was able to live with this ostracisation for a while with the hope they would become bored and turn their focus onto someone else, but I was totally unaware of the lengths they would be willing to go to ensure that I am harshly and painfully punished for what I represent to them. I can’t tell if they genuinely believe I am homosexual; after all, in the eyes of these jocks, anyone who is interested in the dramatic arts has to be a queer. Such is the narrow and prejudicial climate I am living in.

    But these days I am experiencing a depth of companionship and camaraderie with my friends behind the stage, that I have not known before. I had been spending less and less time with the fifth form gang to minimise negative attention, in whose presence I have to grit my teeth, as I am now so used to doing. My defences against verbal abuse are strong but this latest event is of a different caliber.

    To be continued…….

  • Aging is Humbling

    These days I frequently  find myself sitting in wonder and confusion as to where my life has gone. My logical mind tells me that I have now lived three score years and seven; I have memories and momentos that help to inform the reality of this, along with the wear and tear on my body and the changes in my appearance that mark the passage of the years. From that reality it does seem a long time. The advancement of so many technologies and the changes in cultural norms that I have witnessed throughout my life also provide a perspective that supports that whole view.

    Yet here I am, temporarily but frequently lost in an alternative reality in which I still feel like a young person whose life is not finite; destined to certain death, yes, and yet strangely outside of time, living in an eternal now that gives an illusion of unchanging youth. In this way I catch myself feeling about 18, in ageless, unblemished.

    I know I am not alone in having these experiences. Perhaps we all feel this way when we drop into a particular kind of inner reality. (When I reflect on my dreams, for example, I seem ageless in them). I know it as an awareness that springs from deep inside me, as though my soul hasn’t aged along with my body, and a realisation comes to me, even as I am writing this, it seems to me that our souls do not age in the way our bodies do.

    People talk about ‘old souls’ when they witness young children expressing wisdom beyond their mental age, but my sense is that our souls are outside of time in the linear sense, and rather than ageing, they mature according to each person’s particular life experiences, or, in the case of young children, their experiences in previous lives. (Where else could such precocious wisdom come from? But that is a debate for another time.)

    I can see how my life has provided a series of lessons, some of which have enabled me to learn and grow, others have left me none the wiser and therefore needing to repeat a pattern until I reach a new level of awareness. This growth process is happening through strivings to achieve, through the challenges of pain and loss, through the affairs of the heart, through service and importantly through grace.

    When I experience my life from this meta perspective I feel held and at peace with myself through a level of acceptance of what is. But when I am faced with the stark limitations of my ever-aging body and mind, I find myself struggling to accept the inevitable decline in stamina and strength, in mental agility and in memory. I am frustrated daily by the restrictions and limitations on my activities and achievements. It requires a level of humility, patience and self-acceptance that do not come easily. Life becomes a practice in mindfulness, setting appropriate boundaries and allowing time for rest, which can lead to a refining and maturing of the soul. Paradoxically, we become more child-like and free. The Dalai Lama is a wonderful example of this. In the absence of the disciplines which enable this process we can so easily become negative, bitter and cantankerous – the archetypal grumpy old man or woman.

    I am trying to age gracefully and experience life from my soul’s reality, while honouring my aging body’s truth. I appreciate that, as a man, I do not face the same cultural pressures imposed on older women for their looks and appearance, but it is still a challenge and a big lesson in humility.