Time Off from Gazing @ the 20 Minute Mark
My car broke down 1 week ago today and in that time I haven’t even been able to consider sun-gazing because you can’t see her rise or set from my neighborhood during the safe hour because of the swamp of cement and sheet glass in the way. I’m surrounded by development, and I’m afraid that it’s all going to hinder mine. This year has been a crazy kind of roller coaster, with high highs and low lows, and bouts of unshakable faith mixed with bouts of resentful doubt. And since Summer died on me it has felt like the screws are being tightened. I am being beaten down, battered by the storm of circumstance, and angry about it. The collective has strings of prosperous days that signal an end to our financial slump, then just when I start to relax 2 or 3 abysmally slow days tank the entire trajectory. This circumstantial shake up has continued to urge me back to my yoga mat and my chanting. I mention that because I suppose that’s some kind of silver lining. At the start of this year I made a commitment to myself to read a book a week, roughly, at least making it to 41 books in 2014. As I have continued to do this it has been the one constant source of synchronicity in an otherwise volatile an unpredictable year. The synchronicity I am referring to here is in the messages contained in the books. At each stage of my roller coaster it happens that whatever book I pick up next seems to have just the encouraging words I need to hear. Take today for example. I have been feeling exhausted, under appreciated, and quite disappointed by the turn of events since August that has me counting pennies and working more than full time again. Last year I was telling people I am semi-retired. Now I’m just plain old tired; more than ready to give up and throw in the towel. I am on the last chapter of a small book called How to Attract Money by Joseph Murphy and what do you know, but this chapter was basically a giant pep talk for anyone trying to employ the mystical powers of their subconscious mind to persevere and not to give up. Those words couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. I feel myself picking back up the towel I had just thrown in, wiping my brow and continuing down the path set out in front of me. It’s not like there is suddenly a bag of money in front of me. But what is there again is my faith. The words were just the right tonic to create a gap in my minds most recent disaster scenario and allow me to feel hope again. Even as my circumstances seem more and more wild and unpredictable by the day, the single thread of syncronicity that has been constant in my reading list is the support that has begun to renew my faith in the primal force of nature that supports all life, and perhaps most importantly, it is helping me to restore my faith in myself. RESULTS: I have not been sun-gazing since October 29th, the day Summer died. She was my ride to the top of the mountain, so I take that as a sign from the universe to rest my eyes, rest my soul, and know that the 2nd half of my gazing adventure will be there for me when the time is right. For now, this is Brian Hogan, 20 minutes and 7 months into a sun gazing experiment, signing off.
DAY 206: 20 Minutes of Gazing – Summer Days
At 2:45pm pacific time today my sporty convertible, Summer, broke down bringing everything in my life, for a split second, to a screeching halt. I was on my way to a delivery and not in the best part of town. Thankfully there was a place called “Quick Auto Help” about 500 feet away. Perfect name, I thought, as I sputtered over to the shop, Summer growling in pain. As I sat there outside the auto-body shop waiting for Enterprise to come pick me up in a rental car I was aware of something happening inside me. I felt the hotness on my skin and the tightness in my gut that I now know is the warning sign that I’m on the verge of a standard-issue how-the-hell-am-I-going-to-deal-with-this freakout. Usually when something triggers these bodily responses I barely notice them, only to regain any sense of awareness mid-freakout, deep in the abyss of hopelessness anger and victimhood. But it was different today. The sun-gazing, or the chanting, or the yoga has created a sort of space between my bodily emotional reactions (which are involuntary) and my mental definitions of those reactions (which are decisions, although these decisions happen so quickly we humans are mostly unaware that we can choose how to react to things). This space is what Eckhart Tolle is describing in A New Earth when he tries to illuminate exactly what it means to live in the present moment. Perhaps it is better described as living within the present moment because when I truly made the decision to let go of the future in regards to my car, to let go of my penchant for daydreaming disaster scenarios of how it would turn out, there was this warm comforting love that surrounded me; that love is the present moment. I realized as I was experiencing this peace in the midst of what by all rights should be considered an epic fail of an afternoon, that peace and love exist continually and permeate everything. When we live in the past (regret, guilt, nostalgia) or the future (worry, anxiety, yearning) we are the ones who obscure it from view, from our experience. As I surrendered myself to my circumstances yesterday this unexpected love and peace rushed in and flooded my being. I still felt exhausted at the end of the day, and it still felt like a roller coaster. But those are the endorphins and the hormones that create my emotional responses. By not defining those inner stirrings as bad or letting them spin my mind into the next financial apocalypse they didn’t take over. My body still went through them, but without the added anxiety of a mind full of stress and worry. My mind was clear, and my heart was open. So even though my body churned, I just observed this, recognized it, and let it go. I pulled over in my rental car, finally on my way home at sunset, and gazed. I gazed for the first time in weeks in sheer gratitude, rather than with a feeling of begrudging obligation. When I arrived home at the end of the night I was physically exhausted, but mentally sharp, and internally calm. This experience for me was one of seeing how I have increased my awareness. As it stands right now I’m not sure what’s going to happen with Summer, but I already feel grateful for the experience of showing myself how I can overcome anxiety and worry. The afterglow of that experience is pure bliss, a visceral form of empowerment that we can only give to ourselves, with the help of the present moment. So why not start right now? RESULTS: I am sturdier emotionally than I used to be, and than I even thought. This long “Summer” day showed me that.
DAY 204: Still at 19 Minutes & 50 Seconds of Gazing
I am going through a sort of “dark evening of the soul.” I wouldn’t exactly call it a dark night of the soul, because I’m living alone in a beautiful West Hollywood bungalow, making money enough to eat well, pay my bills and have some fun, and I work for my own small business, which is more gratifying than working for someone else. Although I’ll admit there are times when I miss my days as a waiter, not because I like waiting tables, I don’t. But because it was easy, I was good at it, and when I left work I left every single speck of responsibility behind me too. And I’d be leaving with pocketfuls of cash tips, which didn’t hurt either. But ultimately it was unsatisfying and exhausting and left me barely anytime to seriously pursue other creative endeavors like my screenwriting or painting. With the collective things are different. I feel like I carry the responsibilities around me in a heavy sack, just dragging it wherever I go. That’s not being required of me, I know this, it’s my own mind that can’t seem to relax. I want so desperately for things to pick up, but alas, they are remaining steady where they have always been. We completely redid our menu and our descriptions, and we just invested $800 more with weeedmaps to be featured on the West Hollywood regional listing page and we are doing more with social media than we ever have in the past. But none of that, seems to as yet, be making any kind of difference in the bottom line. We still hover at just the right amount to meet expenses but not get paid. I am doing more yoga and meditation than ever before, if for no other reason than to calm my jittery nerves. I don’t like brushing up against poverty, it reminds me of the struggles of my upbringing, and my single-mom raising us paycheck to paycheck. I don’t want that kind of struggle again. I want ease, abundance and prosperity. Obviously, we all do. The stress of this slight downturn for the collective has driven a wedge between me and my Sun Gazing Experiment. I am exhausted both mentally and physically at the end of the day and don’t feel like driving up the mountain to catch the safe minutes of sunset, so I end up telling myself it’s okay and I skip. I believe the sun-gazing can unlock magical and mystical potential that lies dormant in all human beings. I really do. Yet, somehow the mundane and worldly financial problems have taken up more space in my mind than they are welcome to. I’d like to wash the cobwebs and anxiety right out of my body with a tall fresh glass of sunlight. Hopefully tomorrow will see a more motivated and less exhausted version of me, who will actually traipse up the mountain to connect with the source of all life. I’m six months into this thing, there’s no way I’m giving up now. I’m just on a wee coffee break, is all. You’ll see. RESULTS: The sunlight has hooked me, because even though I’ve often skipped these last 8 weeks, he is under my skin, and I can’t stop thinking about him.
DAY 202: Still at 19 Minutes & 50 Seconds of Gazing
I have been struggling to find balance these past few months, perhaps all my life. Since returning from my five week vacation a giant unexpected hurdle came up in the face of the collective. It’s hard to even explain what it is because the collective is still pulling it’s usual numbers, but somehow it’s not enough for JJ and I to get any kind of management pay anymore. I’m working 5 days a week now, also doing some driving again, so I’ll have enough to pay my bills. I’ve tightened my belt and I’m managing to stay afloat, but somehow there is just no extra at all anymore. In the midst of this financial cataclysm (that’s how it feels to me anyway) I have jumped headlong into the collective and trying to make improvements to it, from the menu pictures to the descriptions, to the this newly designed and almost ready to launch shopping cart…but I have done this at the expense of all the other pursuits in my life. I haven’t been gazing, I haven’t been screenwriting or journaling and the last two weeks I haven’t even had time to do my stoned movie reviews (which are actually related to GLM) because I’ve been so single-minded. I believe that all of this work is about to pay off in ways I can’t fully imagine or comprehend. We are on track to have a record breaking month in November assuming the launch goes off, and those kinds of numbers will change everything. I know now that I have to find a balance between my work for GLM and my artistic and spiritual pursuits. I have been fueling the fire of my motivation with fear because of the financial changes that occurred, but now I realize I must fuel my motivation with love. Love for myself, love for what I do, love for life in general. As I practice this balance, remembering to put thoughts of the collective aside from time to time I know I will be giving it the space it needs to grow. SIDE EFFECTS: Things are still bat-shit crazy in my world. BENEFITS: Things are still bat-shit crazy in my world. The truth is I am starting to realize that the distinction between a “benefit” and a “side effect” is in and of itself an illusion. This dichotomy implies that side effects are bad and benefits are good, but the truth is that some of the more challenging things I’ve gone through have fostered some of the deepest growth. From now on I will be merging these two sections into a section called “results.” They aren’t good, or bad, they are results, and it’s up to me to assimilate those results into my life.
DAY 200: Moon Gazing: A New Moon & A Solar Eclipse
Tonight marks the first day of a new moon cycle, and it also happens to be a solar eclipse. In addition today is a Thursday, the day ruled by Jupiter, the planet of abundance and prosperity. So with such a nexus of positive energy, naturally my neighbors and I decided to do a prosperity spell. We’ve taken to calling ourselves a coven. We wrote our desires down on papers, said some prayerful words under the moonlight and joined hands. We set fire to our papers and as we did this we chanted an impromptu incantation “as the light of the moon increases so our fortunes will increase.” It happened naturally, organically, we didn’t plan what to say, and didn’t plan on saying anything at all. I imagine it was like this for the witches of Salem, experimenting with their own power and trying to harness the forces of nature. But in our case without the suspicion of all the villagers and torturous death by fire. The only thing dying by fire tonight is the paper our dreams are written on. And as the paper goes up in flame I imagine it has set my dream free from the prison of the page, from the dungeon of my mind, where it can grow. Free now to take shape, to form itself, and to come back to me in whatever form it wishes. It’s as if I have given my dreams a life, a purpose, indeed, a will of their own. When my dreams return to me in the form of manifestation, I will know in a way more deeply than I do now that dreams really can come true. Schmaltzy maybe, but simple, profound, and real. SIDE EFFECTS: The sun crosses any boundary to shake you into a deeper awareness of life. BENEFITS: You start to experience a deeper awareness of life.
DAY 199: Finally 19 Minutes & 50 Seconds of Gazing
Four days have passed. I finally gazed today, clawing my way toward the 20 minute mark, but not quite there yet. I’ve been at this on and off for almost 200 days now and when I look back before beginning gazing I can see drastic changes have occurred in my life. I am more serene. Right now I’m going on month three of no paycheck and although I don’t love the belt-tightening that’s been required of me I feel pretty okay. The Brian who lived in this body a year ago would have been freaking out, mostly miserable, and looking for the nearest bag of coke or bottle of booze to escape from the anxiety caused by the financial drought. Now I’m inclined to reach for some incense and my yoga mat. I credit the sun-gazing with these changes. Perhaps not singlehandedly, I also started chanting and doing yoga steadily around the same time, but without the structure required by my latest spiritual quest, I would still be spiritually flailing around and physically, probably drunk. SIDE EFFECTS: The sun is fucking serious about helping me grow, and right now it’s pruning the shit out of me. BENEFITS: A pruned plant grows even more robustly.
DAY 195: Still at 19 Minutes & 40 Seconds of Gazing
It’s been an entirely crazy week. The collective seems to be stalled financially at our same old numbers, but the internal changes we have made to the business are staggering. An entire new line of menu pics, new descriptions, new web traffic, a blog, etc…and yet we can’t seem to reach our monthly goals. We are meeting expenses, but not breaking old records. I am savvy enough now to know that this is a blessing, but despite this it still makes me feel a little tense. I’m doing yoga again and I think this is part of the universe’s agenda…to get me back to a clean, healthy and self-loving lifestyle. I needed to be brought low from my party days, from my adventuring or I never would have given it up. This is the method I’ve chosen to use to come back to health, and even though my conscious mind didn’t prefer it at times, so far it has been working like a charm. The Sadhana and the Sun-Gazing has orchestrated this. My entire year has been bent to a schedule that revolves around the schedule of the sun. With the sun-gazing the reasons are obvious, but even with Sadhana, the required 4:00 am rising time encourages my rhythms to sync up with the sun as well. This has been healing and cleansing and I’d like to say magical. But at the moment, I’m just a little too tired. SIDE EFFECTS: When you invite sunlight in to shake up your dysfunctions and make you more whole, it messes with your life. BENEFITS: Whatever, this part of the journey sucks.
DAY 189: Still at 19 Minutes & 40 Seconds of Gazing
I have been getting up for Sadhana at 3:45am pretty consistently for the last week or so now, and it feels amazing and improves the emotional quality of my morning. As a trade off though, by 5:30 when I need to leave to make it to the top of the mountain to gaze, I am exhausted and easily lulled into skipping.
DAY 187: 19 Minutes & 40 Seconds of Gazing
I could not get myself off the couch to go and gaze. This has been happening more and more the further I get into this process. It’s as if I am fighting my spiritual growth, which is really just regular growth, because everything has a spiritual component to it. The greeting card someone sends goes out with words written on it, but energy stamped on it as well. The glance of a stranger isn’t just eyeballs, it also has it’s own quality, it’s own vibe, if you will. I believe that invisible realm is trying to present itself to me and prove itself, and show itself in no uncertain terms. But I am resisting my own faith, my own blossoming. I feel that way, but in the end I am probably right on schedule and worrying for nothing. Indeed all worrying is for nothing. I have become lost in the midst of this gazing adventure. My schedule has cracked along with my collective and my faith. Money is tighter than it’s been in years, my rent is late, and I’m saving up for groceries. I haven’t had to save up for groceries since we grew up with a single-mom putting herself through college while raising two kids. I am a single gay male in West Hollywood with my own pot business, so what in the hell is happening? My mind is crowded with stress these days. I meditate, I even started a yoga set that I’ll be doing once a day for the next thousand days, but somehow the vice grip of monetary stillness keeps bearing down tighter. I want to be more resolute about my gazing and my happiness. I want to be like J Krishnamurti extolls, where I “just don’t mind what happens.” I’ve glimpsed that serene state of being, flirted with it, but I can’t seem to lower my guard and let it stay for breakfast the next morning. My mind is all over the place. SIDE EFFECTS: I skipped it again today so I wouldn’t know. BENEFITS: I am aware that it’s most beneficial to remain positive and I try to hold onto that. But shit sucks right now.
DAY 186: 19 Minutes & 30 Seconds of Gazing
I’ve been reading this Eckhart Tolle book called A New Earth in which he describes how to transcend our ego, emerge into a sense of timelessness and end all of our mental and emotional suffering. I’ve been gobbling it up like crazy. Tolle quotes a beautiful story told by Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti in which he addresses his audience one evening by unexpectedly asking “do you want to know my secret?” Um, I’m thinking yeah! Here it comes: the secret to a deep transcendent experience of life, indeed the key to life itself! You could hear a pin drop as everyone waited with bated breath to hear what pearl of wisdom would come next from the master’s lips. “This is my secret,” Krishnamurti finally says, “I don’t mind what happens.” And I started thinking, wow, I’m actually feeling like that at the moment. I described my current state of being to my friend Ben and he brought up J Krishnamurti himself, confirming to me in the way The Great Whatever out there likes to do that I am on the right path and making good choices. The gaze was peaceful and soothing again. I think my eyes have shifted into a place of being more in tune with the sun. This has happened at a time when I have given up meat as well again so I’m not sure if they are related, but in the interest of scientific purity I wanted to include it here. I’m meatless for about two weeks now, and I’m also better able to tolerate the sun. SIDE EFFECTS: My circumstances have continued to rock and rage as if being tossed like driftwood on a stormy sea. BENEFITS: I feel more at peace and tranquil even within the storm of my circumstances. I don’t react, I integrate. It’s pretty neat.
