About four years ago, in the twilight hours of the night, I sat under the Northern California stars puffing on hand-rolled tobacco.
Technically, I quit all types of nicotine—snus, cigs, dip, even vape (oh yes, I vaped hard)—years before this moment. But on rare occasions, in certain revered spaces, I allow myself a smoke, especially in the afterglow that follows a candle-lit ayahuasca ceremony.
In the shimmer of this post-ceremony evening, I felt centered and empowered, my mind free of its typical hyperactive chatter, tasting sweet relief. As I sat drawing slow, steady drags from the tobacco, I gazed up at the glistening stars, feeling at once vast and small. I was just there, in the moment. In the type of tingly presence meditation teachers wax about.
By this point, I had already immersed myself into every recovery paradigm I could find. I had launched my newsletter, gotten divorced, fasted for weeks in a hut in the middle of the Amazon, and was deep into my studies of yoga and Buddhist-based psychology. The wolf that lives inside my chest, the beast who demands not to be forgotten, had been rehabilitated, then redirected towards developmental growth. This part of me was on fire.
And yet, I had an alternate life in another lane where I felt entirely stuck, like I was sharing a swimming section at the YMCA pool, bumping into granny elbows with each stroke I took. My tech career, too, was rehabilitated and back “on track,” raining with the quarterly bonuses and promotions and all those empowering happenings. Even so, it was clear to me that I was being drawn away from OKRs and board meetings. I had no idea where I’d end up. At times, I felt lost. The cognitive dissonance between the two lanes was so palpable, the unraveling so imprecise, I feared my psyche might tear into two.
So, as a brisk Northern California breeze rippled my poncho, I decided to take advantage of the welcomed clarity and presence. I took a drag and closed my eyes. I then asked the stars above me and Mary Oliver: What should I do with my one precious life?
Instantly, unflinchingly, I received an answer: Coach. The response was so unapologetically clear, so full-bodied in its delivery, I started immediately rejecting it. Naturally.
I knew the answer was not about coaching corporate T-ball teams; it was about helping people reconnect to themselves, heal their addictions, reclaim joy. Goddamn, had I worked hard to do those things for myself. It seems one of the consequences of skirting death is a yearning to help others do the same. Hence, I was already coaching like this in an unofficial capacity, in recovery communities, and with friends.
But I am a second-generation American Jew from an East Coast suburb, an environment that can cultivate hard-charging, Type A, even consumerist values. Although I was not raised wealthy or consumerist, I chose to rebel against all of it with drugs, cheating, arrogant shenanigans. And yet, despite whatever anti-establishment streak I carried, I was still most comfortable playing the only game in town. My intrinsic worth was inextricably linked to fancy titles, accolades, the almighty big bucks. A humble coaching practice could never fit into that trajectory.
Not to mention, at that time, the thought of being a coach disgusted me. Literally. The word made my insides swarm so violently in the moment that I needed to slow my drags of the tobacco. In my world, “life coach” was a dirty word. Career coaches, I had concluded, were people who couldn’t build meaningful careers of their own. I, on the other hand, had a consummate, highly employable resumé I spent an entire life cultivating (with my old friend dextroamphetamine). On paper, all the ingredients for success, happiness, and cosmic significance were there … except for the meaningful part.
My feelings on the matter were especially salient as I had just met with a coach the week prior—a man praised as someone who could help me marry the two lanes in which I found myself swimming. In addition to being fifteen minutes late to our video call, he looked like he wanted to seduce me, and ultimately reminded me of Dennis from Always Sunny in Philadelphia—a creepy narcissist. I left the meeting feeling like he was the one who needed coaching.
I told myself that this recent encounter with a coach explained the mystical answer—that I should coach. That’s how the mind works, the materialist in me thought, unwilling to cede even the slightest amount of trust to my own insight-generating capacity. In those days, I understood “intuition” as just a spooky word for rapid-fire pattern recognition, a rational activity limited to the prefrontal cortex.
As I finished the smoke, my friend Derek came and sat next to me, about to start his own smoking ritual. He’s a wise psychologist, so I told the man with domain expertise: “Hey, something weird just happened. I got a message that I am supposed to coach people.”
Without hesitation, he replied, “I think you’d be great at it.”
I shrugged it off, unable to hear him, my Self, or the spirit of the stars.
In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali defines yoga in a simple, yet penetrating way: yogas citta vritti nirodha. This Sanskrit sutra describes consciousness (citta) as a cosmic ocean. Thoughts (vrittis) are the waves that an individual catches from the grand sea of consciousness. The movement of those waves are what we today dub “the monkey mind”—the citta vritti—the voice inside our ears that rarely quiets, often barking negative thoughts.
According to yogic philosophy, swells of thoughts will form inside our minds, with one or two cresting into big waves that we human apes will ride into our conscious awareness. Those tidal thoughts eventually become emotions, which then morph into behaviors—and in what can feel like a blink of an eye—a string of behavioral patterns can shape one’s entire life.
Thus, yoga is the practice of nirodha, or the cessation of relentless thought, which also happens to be aligned with the Third Noble Truth in Buddhism. Nirodha refers to the abeyance of suffering, breaking the cycle of insatiable craving for more, more, more. One of the first Yoga Sutras states:
“When the mind is settled, we are established in our own essential state, which is unbounded consciousness.”
Carl Jung’s insight around the collective unconscious describes a similar ocean of shared consciousness. He posited that the deepest part of the unconscious mind is not shaped by personal experience, but rather through an inherited sea of ancestral memories, archetypes, and experiences common to all humankind. Much like the dream world, this is a non-dual realm beyond space-time, sometimes referred to as the “mind of God.” Core to Jung’s message was bringing the unconscious forces produced by this dimension into conscious awareness—otherwise, we remain an iceberg submerged in a dark sea.
That night, when I found myself in a state of quiet, the vrittis of my mind were dimmed all the way down. From that expansive state, it seems a message from the ocean of the unconsciousness dropped squarely into my lap, its landing so loud, every part of my being heard it.
When a message arrives in this way—especially with regards to something as hefty as purpose or meaning—it simply lands. It is a felt sense, what the ancient Greeks called gnosis and William James described as noetic: a mystical insight into the true nature of reality. One cannot think their way into gnosis. It is the poetry of experience that can only be translated into language by a third, maybe fourth degree.
Following the gnosis, less enlightened parts of my mind re-appeared, activated as ever, ready to refute all I had just experienced. From a Jungian mythopoetic lens, my defensive reaction was the “Refusal of the call.” Since the dawn of humankind, the trope has perpetuated in our psyches and been retold in the Western canon, like when Simba refused to accept that he’s the rightful heir to Pride Rock. It’s when a part of us knows what we must do, but the rest of us is unwilling to embrace the fact.
In my case, it was also a refusal of the Mysterious, my rationalist mind unable to accept that, maybe, intuition is more than just cortical pattern recognition. I will not be so bold as to claim I know why highly personalized, dharmic messages like these come to us, whether via God, ancestral memories, or just an undistracted sense of Self.
Regardless, I enjoy pondering the possibilities. The stew of life tastes much richer when you keep the door open to what you do not know. Most of the time, I can keep that gate cracked slightly ajar, letting in enough light to remind me that yes, I have a heart, and yes, it still beats. Other times, as on that auspicious night, I kick the door off the damn hinges, blasting myself with a radical aliveness and intimacy that I swear I’ll never forget. From that spaciousness, secret cheat codes of the universe revamp my being like I’m changing out of work clothes and pulling on my comfiest sweats.
The Deep Fix book club is currently reading No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz, which is about Internal Family Systems (IFS), a groundbreaking psychological approach to harmonizing inner conflict. In it, Schwartz lays out a theory of the non-unitary mind, describing how we all have multiple “parts,” instead of just one “mono-mind.”
For instance, the conglomeration that is “Alex” is not just one mind. There’s a part of me that is a Materialist Cynic, the Bad Boy that still loves to smoke, and the Hypochondriac Health Nut who fears doing so—even on rare occasions—insisting on procuring only the choicest organic tobacco leaves, because, veganism.
Schwartz describes how, in addition to parts, we all have a capital-S Self at the seat of our consciousness. This has been called the Higher Self, Soul, Atman, or Godhead. It is a pure awareness, the fundamental goodness carried by all humans.
This Self—or Soul—is the part of the human being connected to the eternal realm of the collective consciousness described by Jung. It is indestructible, always residing in that timeless dimension. For this reason, the Self is connected to infinite potential, which renders it in human form as curious, compassionate, courageous, creative, connected, and more.
But far too often, the Self is diluted by protective parts of us that obscure its brilliance, a hallmark of our modern times. Thus, the goal of IFS is to become a “Self-led” person rather than a “parts-led” person. The melodrama my own parts love to play out is between the Perfectionist and the Imposter—a pair that often collude together, like stage actors—shrewing doubt, then sabotaging action. From their perspective, coaching was a worthless pursuit because I am a worthless fraud.
IFS posits that Self is both a particle and a wave, as quantum physics has proven to be the case for everything in the known universe. Similarly, pure individualized consciousness—Self—is a particle that emerges from the infinite wave of unbounded consciousness. Unfortunately, we humans are quite gifted at muddying these pristine waters of Self with vrittis, trauma, reality TV, the rat race, fast fashion, you get the picture.
Yet! Even when its radiance is dimmed, the Self remains eternally tethered to that unbounded space—to all the love, guidance, and wisdom it contains. To that end, the project becomes about unsullying the waters. First for ourselves, then for the planet.
It can feel vain, even self-indulgent to write about something as transcendent as the Self and Soul while much of our world bleeds. And yet, wholing the psyche is the most important work any individual can embark on. We need carriers of the message, “light warriors” undiluted by conspiracy, surfers who can weather rip tides and always come home after sunset. When we merge with the grander ocean of Self, big questions like “what am I supposed to do with my one precious life” can be answered in a heartbeat. Oftentimes, those answers include some form of creative, altruistic service.
“It’s easy to be a naive idealist. It’s easy to be a cynical realist. It’s quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.” –Marie-Louise von Franz
Humans have a negativity bias, an evolutionary adaptation that lets us take in nine bits of negative information for every one positive bit. We do this to ensure the survival of our particle Self. So, my rejection was, in fact, only natural.
The refusal extended for a few laps around the sun. Yet the teaching never left me—that if you slow down and become ever so quiet, answers emerge on their own. I think I’ll turn that into a bumper sticker. Maybe that’s my next career move.
Because as Patanjali and Jung forewarned, stepping into Self is always difficult for the Ego, since it involves restructuring the power hierarchy of the psyche, where the Ego is no longer the top dog. IFS models this, too. When the Self “unblends” from its parts, the fear-based Ego now serves a higher master—Self, along with its transcendent prerogative.
On my journey to becoming (more, Inshallah) Self-led, I learned to soothe the parts that doubted coaching. To trust in the grander story my soul already knows. That includes not being so bold as to question the validity of messages when they drop into my lap like a single pebble tossed into a silent lake.
Curiously, strikingly, I had forgotten about this post-ceremony burst of insight until a couple of weeks ago. Either because my memory cells are still fried, or because I’ve just been living it. But when I remembered, I heard the roar of God’s laughter, knowing I had been schooled yet again by an undiscovered gravity. Whatever it is that animates the Self, it seems equal parts King and Jester, a playful wavemaker that knows me better than I know myself.
Great piece and weaving of topics! I remember that night and shared moment very clearly too :) What a pleasant surprise coming across that and being reminded. Amazing to reflect on what has unfolded and evolved from that night. Cheers to “doing the work”!
Love this piece. Never heard that awesome quote by Marie-Louise von Franz. Also appreciate the way you framed the perfectionist-imposter dilemma. Can really relate to that one. It’s interesting how because of certain attachments we may have, we can act as our own worst enemies. In Aramaic, the word for “Satan” is equivalent to “a house divided”. And we know that a house divided cannot stand…