Becoming The Way

Airing Wounds, Discovering Calling and Finding A Better Way Forward

Sailing into the Light. Photo by Rocco Jarman

This is a re-release of an older post. It is not only about my own journey but actually all of ours.

It is a longer piece, about the journey of becoming whole and finding true belonging. Such accounts cannot and should not be rushed.

This is an account of the journey I am on, and I invite you to walk it with me because how other people face and transcend the circumstances of their lives can become maps for us to follow. And through that correspondence, we can begin to appreciate how our own spiritual survival stories can become someone else’s spiritual survival guide.

---

Before we begin, please note that you can listen to this post like a podcast episode by downloading the iOS app. In fact, does thinking about this like a podcast episode change the way you appreciate it?

We are all on a journey.

We are not always sure exactly where it is leading. Sometimes, with a sense of cosmic irony, the more certain we are, the more life continues to surprise us, and we learn that we never actually knew the way at all. This is because our journeys change us. They are meant to. This is the purpose of a life.

The secret aim of adversity is transformation.

What I have come to understand, is that the best way to define what pulls us forward so inexorably is a wish to be free of the need for struggle. We call it peace, and acceptance.

In a sense, what we long for, is arrival.

Without knowing it, we actually hold the essence of a simple prayer in our hearts: To be Whole and to be Home. Arrival, in this sense, is our wish for a healing of wounds, a redressing of things that broke our hearts and took our promise from us. It is the wish for True Belonging, the kind that cannot be taken away, or lost; or if lost, can be found by means within our means. Additionally, we want to arrive at vantage points on that journey, where we can look back and discover that there was meaning to our struggle.

Ultimately, we want to reach the end even, without the burden of regret that we cannot forgive in ourselves. And before it is too late for us to enjoy the harvest of our toil. We want to arrive in a place of sanctuary, respite from adversity, where our striving and our lessons are done at last, and we can finally put to bed our careers of enduring and overcoming, and settle at last into our inheritance.

My Quest for Arrival.

Every time in my life I felt as though I was reaching some end, where I would find, my respite, my success, I reached the place, only to realise, sometimes with a wise sense of knowing, sometimes with a sense of fatigue and resignation, that what lay in front of me, was, simply another beginning.

Eventually, I made peace with the understanding that what pulls us forward so inexorably and faithfully, is that precise wish to be free of our wounds, and to belong to the world, and that our deepest form of belonging is via purpose. Our wounds are tied exactly to our sense of calling.

Of course they are. The sublime perfection of this should not be lost on anyone.

The very thing that we are trying to be and become and give in this world, is always, always thwarted in the exact way that we need to grow, heal, forgive, and understand. The secret aim of such adversity, is the necessary alchemy of the soul.

Our healing from our wounds is actually the exact apprenticeship we need to be able to live our purpose, share our gifts and create our legacy in this world. Our wounds and our dearest cares it turns out, are all the map and stars we ever need to chart our course, and the shape love makes when we hold it in our hearts, the only compass.

My own apprenticeship over the past 50 years has been a set of miraculously exacting circumstances, which span many phases, each of which seemed in hindsight nearly perfectly designed to break (and thereby make) a person. From my unintended conception to my time of “unwantedness” in the womb culminating in an arrival through birth, that was marked by trauma, tragedy, grief and isolation. Through a childhood, adolescence and early adulthood of neglect, abuse, grief, violence, displacement, national and spiritual disinheritance and trauma of almost every kind that can scar a human psyche. Ending in a protracted period of transition and self-forging that manifested through a staggered breakdown of loss, rejection and failure that culminated in divorce, loss of my children and my community and eventually in the rude and thankless ejection from a 27-year corporate career through which I had failed in the end to define myself.

We are all on a journey.

About seven years ago, I started exploring rock bottom. I woke up to a life I was not at home in, acting out a persona I did not respect or love, and surrounded by people who did not have an appetite for growth or self-ownership.

As soon as I chose to make a play for my own soul, and my own self-worth, not the shallow bullshit of ambition and status, but the true sense of self-love, things began to change. The inevitable problem I discovered that arrives first, is that we make a few steps in the right direction and convince ourselves that we are done and the world should meet us in the place of our naive expectation. Our wounds are not just to our hearts, but to our psyches, warping our predictive models of what we can expect from the world, how long a healing process takes, and what it will cost us in the end, along the way. The healing journey is its own profound ass-kicking, and when we turn around to head for home, we imagine life and providence will meet us halfway. We discover only many gruelling miles deep into that pilgrimage just how naive our understanding of the journey and the destination actually is. This is actually the only way we grow sometimes; painfully.

My own source of profound meaning I began to derive in all this, was via an insight that steadily began to dawn in me was that all of this, had always been happening for me, not to me. What that looked like in practice was the choosing of an authentically held stance of grace, underwritten by a premise I was progressively waking up to, that I had on some level, chosen this. Every single deep wounding was a sacred opportunity for me to choose love, to understand, and to integrate the profound wisdom of the lesson which provided the mechanism for a kind of acceleration and accretion, an appreciation, of the soul which is so fundamental to Actualisation.

Great souls are not born at birth, they are born over a lifetime of choosing courage and grace and choosing to find the lesson and the empowerment in every adversity. I am not there yet—I believe that is the work, and journey, of a lifetime—but I am starting to believe the formula. I am starting to trust and follow The Way.

This last stretch has been absolutely relentless and threshing, but also profoundly rewarding, a process that has given me an unshakable sense of being and self-knowledge I would not trade for any money in the world. The threshing is, of course, absolutely necessary to liberate the kernel from the husk, however ungentle that process needs to be.

This has included treating my own mental health, getting remarried, having a child again in my late 40s, and dealing with a profound sense of calling I still do not know how to process or honour, let alone live up to.

This has played out all in all, in an intense five-year quest, which became disheartening over the past few months since I was “made redundant”. To be clear, “redundancy” is one of those corporate jargonistic Australianisms, a linguistic and psychological sleight-of-hand, conceived by the kind of corporate sociopaths that businesses hire in their Legal department to favourably adjust the lens of social critique when businesses do something that any moral society would expect a human being to be ashamed of if they did the same thing. In normal language, it simply means to be laid-off, or sacked, for reasons that have nothing to do with your performance or competence, and everything to do with a series of poor management decisions by board members and business leadership. “Redundancy” is meant to sound like the position is no longer required, as in “your role is redundant in the context of the necessary organisational restructure”, and the business is always painted as the hapless victim of cruel market circumstance.

Since then, what I again naively expected was going to be the new lease on life I had been secretly praying for, a way for me to finally invest my prodigious gifts and experience into something that aligned with my sense of purpose and calling, was instead a whole new chapter of rude awakening to the reality of self-employment.

The below, is how I arrived at my wounds, which is how we all arrive at our gifts.

Trusting The Stuckness.

Over the last few months, I have received the most incredible insight: To Trust the Stuckness.

The premise is that if life is, in fact, happening for us, not simply to us, any stuckness we feel, and all our crossroads and protracted moments of adversity, are not punishments or a form of neglect from the universe, but rather invitations to congruence and alignment.

Wherever we are incongruent with ourselves, however subtly, I came to realise, that we engage in a form of deep subversive self-sabotage and energetic self-compromise we are rarely fully aware of. For me, this was the last deep, and near invisible strands that formed the mesh of a Victim Story: “The World is Broken and Unfair, and I have been dealt a cruel hand.”

In one sense, this is not entirely inaccurate. But, underlying whatever threads of fact and truth this was resting on, was the other truth, that at bottom, this was still a lived belief in scarcity and disempowerment. How can we ever step into the fullness of our own myth, and inherit our full legacy of power, vitality and attractive, creative potential if we are secretly nursing a grievance, however fairly arrived at?

I had not meant to write any of what follows after this section, it all sort of came tumbling out. It feels like a necessary clearing, the reconciling of a journal and of a ledger, one that shaped my relationship with my own destiny and calling, and that which out of a sensible but ultimately limiting sense of privacy and nobility I have left in the dark for too long.

Airing truth, even if the wound has been healed already, is a form of disinfection that paves the way for disintegration of the old belief system that was shaped in a time of necessity when we were more vulnerable and less empowered to uphold our boundaries. It is what allows us to redraft the plot arc of our story, which until we air it, conspires to edify a victim narrative that undermines our efforts towards success and prosperity. To face it, it seems is not enough. We need to air it, to delegitimise the influence it has on our psyches and our lives.

Misalignment and Realignment.

When we get wounded, we treat the wound, well or badly, and invariably our posture or our gait is forever affected by the way we had to compensate for the carrying of that wound while it healed. What begins as a form of vigilance to protect our healing wound, is later integrated as unconscious habit. We guard our wounded side, or limp to spare the re-knitting tissues any further strain, we favour the other hand—any number of pragmatic coping mechanisms to spare us further pain and injury. What begins as a compensation, inadvertently becomes a form of strain or sustained stress which manifests elsewhere in the body. Later, we sometimes need to reopen a wound that will not heal to scrape it clean or remove scar tissue that impairs our freedom of movement and function in some way. Later still, we realise that other symptoms which plague us, are actually caused indirectly by how we compensated for the original injury. This is a whole deeper level of rehabilitation which requires not only the physical mechanics of realignment and reconditioning but also a kind of reliving of the original wounding as a way to disintegrate the survival posture, the misalignment we once adopted out of necessity.

Through the lens of mythos, we can relate to the following paradigm:

When a child arrives in the world, they come with a “Fate” of sorts, a set of circumstances that ties them to their place and their time through family and community. They come with a “Destiny”—for want of a better word—a set of callings and purpose they come to fulfil. We may call these our Prime Agreement. The Prime Agreement is non-negotiable.

As a child, we arrive vulnerable, impressionable, hopeful and helpless. We are compelled to make agreements or comply with what is in their community, in order to find our way to the door of adulthood.

These first “agreements” are ignorant of and in opposition to our Prime Agreement. The society or family, the power brokers we have to negotiate with, would have not found yet their own way, and our impulses to go against the flow are seen as disrespectful, ungrateful, arrogant, foolhardy and entitled.

If we are fortunate, life presents us the kind of opportunities where we get to dismantle the narrative, and paradigm of virtue we inherit as children. Our awakenings always arrive as disillusionment and heartbreak, whereby we are forced to recalibrate our compass and re-align ourselves with our own sense of principle and self-belief in order to heal.

All adversity and frustrations, become the opportunities through which they can renegotiate or break the lesser agreements and align more faithfully with their Prime Agreement.

Through every form of becoming lost or stuck, they are afforded the opportunity to orientate to an awakening of their own Myth and to begin following their own Star in the Sky.

I have sat with all of this in time, and shed light on it privately, or rarely shared very intimately with therapists and later in part with my wife, but which I have never properly spoken out aloud. My generation normalised this as some form of admirable virtue, to stoically understate our wounds and experiences. Later it became fashionable to overshare and amplify them in the celebration of victimhood. This account meanders delicately somewhere in between.

Until an hour ago, I had never meant to share the following. It is a raw and honest account of my own journey through childhood and what I came to learn only later was a second adolescence, which I only properly matured out of in my 40s after much adversity, grief and loss. Such is the way.

My First Inheritance.

I was born 2 months premature, my twin brother never survived his own birth, my half-sister was the product of date rape and I came to learn neither of us was wanted.

That is not to say we were not loved. But to be “wanted”, in the deep archetypal sense of the word, is something so few children experience in this world. Either our parents stumble into a reality that they would not have chosen to begin with, or they choose to have children and are somehow unrequited in their wishes by the gender, personality or simply the often thankless reality of parenthood that transpires. To be “wanted”, is when the parent chooses, forever, the full implication of what it means to be responsible for their own unexamined expectations.

My mother was what is called a “late lamb”, the last of six children born into an incredibly staunch protestant community, and was sort of excommunicated when she fell pregnant out of wedlock, barely 20, which was considered to be a shameful public scandal. Two years later, at the age of 22, she was a working single mother, pregnant with twins, alone and trying to find love, find herself, and build a life she most certainly would not have chosen. In those days, it was not the public taboo to drink and smoke during pregnancy which thankfully it is today, which she did, like many other of her peers. As a result, my twin brother was stillborn and I spent the rest of my childhood and early adulthood pining for a depth of connection that I never understood and could only ever be unrequited. I spent the first six weeks of my life in an incubator, which in those days would have meant little or no human touch.

When I did come home from the hospital, my mother recounts that she found my biological father, blind drunk; and she kicked him out, and they divorced some time later. I never met the man or enquired much about him but I came to intuit that there was more to his poorness of character than alcoholism, but I was never told more, and I was somehow never curious to find out.

By the time I was nine, my mother married my step-father, a physically powerful man with a fragile ego, a tragic and highly dysfunctional childhood and of comparatively modest intelligence. I was a sensitive child who was fiercely principled and that resulted in fertile ground for physical abuse. My mother allowing it, and allowing her own physical abuse, provided the emotional abuse that undermined my own sense of security and sense of faith that the world was fair, ‘just’ or good.

I became a curious paradox. I was gifted at school, but quite uncoordinated in sports and other physical activities. I had never had many toys as a young kid, and I used to play imagination games—I certainly never enjoyed the natural aptitude for ball sports or hand-eye coordination which usually comes to boys from playing catch with their father or siblings, but I was more than adequately compensated with my abilities in track and field. Society in that era had very monochrome paradigms; kids were either normal or weird. Boys were either sporty, or nerds, or delinquent. My home life necessitated that I matured more rapidly than my peers, and so I was a frustrating undefinable quantity. I was part nerd, part athletic, part advanced, part weird. My maturity and intellect, smart mouth and undiagnosed neurodivergence were impressive when no one’s ego was at stake, when my peers or an adult felt insult or threat, this became a ready source of punishment, social bullying, verbal and physical abuse.

I was identified by teachers as intellectually gifted and ‘special’, a subject of psychological confusion for me, and a source of humiliation for my sister, who was invariably compared to me and who invariably had some resentment towards me based on this. On the one hand, I was lambasted by teachers for daydreaming but was praised for adroitness of mind and skill with language. At home, I was wheeled out like a show pony for guests or at parties, but I was physically punished for voicing my conviction about things. I normalised the dysfunction in one sense and withdrew from my family completely, and the world, in another, based on what I intuited was a deep sense of injustice in the world.

Without having the right language to articulate this, or the opportunity of trust and confidence to express this to anyone else, I had a felt ‘knowing’ that my mother was betraying the institution of Motherhood. In our home, everyone was suffering with their own unhealed wounds, but I was uniquely positioned insofar as no one was below me on the dominance hierarchy. I was the youngest and as I intuited, also the most vulnerable. My sister, especially as she went through puberty a few years ahead of me, and as is true for many older siblings, saw me as fair game for her pain and frustrations which manifested as psychological abuse, neglect and a pathological amplification of her own wants and needs over everyone else’s. The person that I might have formed a bond of solidarity with, I ended up mistrusting because they should have known better, given our common plight and shared experience.

As a result, I tried to find depth of connection and a sense of belonging in my friendships and later in romantic relationships. I was way too intense, my mental intelligence far outstripped my emotional intelligence and my nervous system was dysregulated from years of living with the threat of violence, at home and in the political hotbed of South Africa in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. My default response to threat, emotional or physical, was aggression. I lived with a sense of injustice and anger that life had cruelly robbed me of my first inheritance.

Early adulthood I came to understand only later in my 40s, was actually just another adolescence. Like so many of us, I showed up as an adult; I had a driver’s license, the right to vote, and the ability to work, to incur debt and to be held liable for choices I was not yet equipped to make.

My Second Inheritance.

Naturally, I did not fare much better in the workplace. I was more principled than the leaders I worked for and sometimes more competent. I had little tolerance for any instruction, decision or convention I perceived to be unwise or impractical. What is more, I had what I later learned was a unique and as-yet undiagnosed and uncategorised form of Neurodivergence. How this manifested was two-fold. On the positive side, it showed up as mental sharpness in being able to identify flaws in processes and systems, and incongruencies between what people claimed to want and what they were saying or doing. On the challenging side, it showed up as a disregard for authority that I perceived was inadequate and a disregard for etiquette especially when used as a shield for any choice that was likely to cause harm or cost to others. From the outside, it was not easy to tell that I was principled, to anyone who did not have the wherewithal to invest energy and attention to dig deeper, it simply seemed like I was rude, arrogant, disruptive and tactless. Much of that was true.

When I began working, the original narrative was one of hope born from what I perceived to be an opportunity for me to make something of myself where I could define myself on my own terms. The belief was that I could finally define myself and my standing, and my security in the world in a way that would eclipse the egregious cosmic oversights and handicaps of my childhood and school career.

The reality that presently arrived was the grounds for what I internalised as an even deeper form of betrayal by “Fate” or “Life”. To me, everyone was playing games; they were either manipulators or manipulated. I felt doubly aggrieved because not only was my accurate insight and principle not valued, but I was also judged and professionally limited by my peers who were to my heart not my true peers. It was not just that I was a smart-arse that thought they knew everything, my predictions and caveats were proven right again and again. It is a form of torture to invest deeply in projects and to care deeply for people and see either suffer through the bumbling and arrogant incompetence of management and leadership who were always too locked in small games of politics, power and status to understand the impact of their poor choice on the people that worked for them. If they weren’t playing power games, they were simply too ignorant to understand what they would have needed to understand to make better decisions and too arrogant to believe that their narrow understanding was incomplete. In each case, without exception, the person responsible was able to easily avoid culpability through spin and misdirection, and the jury of peers was either jostling for favour or opportunity themselves and thereby incentivised to play along or were too meek or dejected to do anything, or too dull to notice. To me, the game was rigged in favour of those with sociopathic tendencies who had more comfort in compromising their own integrity and exploiting others in the service of their own self-promotion.

I had a dual and mounting sense of shame and frustration insofar as I knew that I was highly capable and gifted and that this had translated into inevitable expectations both myself and other people had placed on me, and yet I had failed to conquer and flourish in the world that I had chosen to invest in and express myself through. Secondly, I was aggrieved at the many compounding injustices that had disenfranchised me and robbed me of my second inheritance.

My complaint was that people lacked imagination, conviction, principle and self-awareness. My own anger and frustration of course blinded me thoroughly to my own blindness. Insult was added to injury in the way I was rendered powerless to see the “right thing” done. I lived with a deep sense of injustice and my deepest wound was of being misunderstood.

My one saving grace during that period was a form of spiritual direction and certainty I had. I had been mentored by an uncle on my mother’s side who was a quirky gifted intellectual with his own intense neurodivergence exacerbated by a lopsided emotional development. He had prodigious intellectual talents, an encyclopedic knowledge of botany, physics and literature and he saw in me a kindred sort of human which he could invest in and mould. He helped me train my memory and introduced me to esoteric spirituality, which through principles like karma, consciousness and divinity provided me with enough of a framework to set a course in my life where I held myself accountable for my choices and my integrity. He began mentoring me at the age of around 11 or 12, which expanded my understanding, amplified my gifts and talents and further distanced me in terms of alignment with my social peers.

This house of cards came tumbling down traumatically in my early 20s when a public scandal exposed him as a pedophile and a sexual deviant who had preyed on his vulnerable clients and patients, which included children. That he had never betrayed this shadow side of his psychology to me was a personal blessing, but instantly a source of anger, vicarious guilt, and a betrayal of all the ethics he had framed for me. It was also a loss of the sole figure I had ever found to look up to. This led to my wholesale rejection of my spirituality, which I ejected painfully and decisively from my core operating system, and a decade or more of exploring physics, philosophy, atheism and reductionism. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it was a necessary education for the dualistic and integrated position I hold today, but it was a very poor substitute for the warmth we get from our forms of religion or spirituality.

It is a whole different level of deep psychological trauma to lose one’s faith and with it our sense of security, belonging in the world, especially when this faith and belief system had provided the only respite and sense of meaning to the life of abuse and dysfunction I had been born into and endured. In one moment everything that troubled me, was hard, but it was my karma, my cosmic lot to endure and learn from in this life, and in the next minute, it was all another fucking story, told by another ‘false’ man who lacked the courage of their own convictions and who was not a model of a man at all. And all my sense of merit and worth that I had clawed back was undermined by my association with him. What followed was a dark period for me, no less emotionally difficult than my childhood or adolescence had been, but now for the first time, I was alone in a cold indifferent Universe, in which I unwittingly sought security in my intellect and mental prowess and cauterised some aspect of my emotional or psychological spectrum of human engagement even further.

My ex-wife and kids from my first marriage were the casualties of that whole unhealed mess. In my defence, I did not know better, and I struggled to make myself understood by therapists and thereby to feel safe; I could not respect anyone’s discernment enough to sincerely take their direction or abide by their judgement. To be clear, I was not unlikable. I was a champion for the downtrodden and overlooked. I was fiercely principled, I was charming and courageous and I was Just to a fault, and generous to a fault. I added a lot of value to ‘business’ and to the lives of many people, for which I am still proud, but I realised way, way too late, what a fucking mess I was.

My True Inheritance.

What dawned on me later during my healing and self-directed rehabilitation process, was on how complete and “too perfect” my arrangement of circumstance seemed to be.

One of the modalities I developed during this time, was the notion of subjective objectivity or objective subjectivity. Objective Subjectivity refers to a balanced approach I developed to “step through” my psychological “operating system”, where one takes into account both objective circumstances and subjective experiences when analysing a situation. This could be a present situation unfolding or one that I was reviewing in the project of psychological debugging and self-repair. The aim is to arrive at a comprehensive appreciation that incorporates external factors and objective reality, and internal emotional states, while also critically evaluating any inherent biases or judgements. This method allowed me to scrutinize not just what was happening around me, but also the way I personally experienced and interpreted these events. Most importantly it allowed me to “step through” and debug the code of my own operating system.

What came out of that exercise for me, over time, was the impression of being in some kind of deliberately orchestrated simulation perfectly designed to break, (or mould) a person. On the one hand, I was given all the attributes which would act as amplifying modifiers of an individual's susceptibility to complex emotional and psychological experience. On the other, I was systematically wounded in every place for which the human psychology has an archetypal (Jungian) placeholder.

Since then, and only after my life all fell apart and I made these efforts to put it back together, (and the pressure to do it right this time), did I become aware of what Neurodivergence is, and how extremely neurodivergent I was, specifically in a way that does not track with the usual categories of diagnosis. I have also come to understand that I was suffering from a hyper-vigilant nervous system; I was anxious, depressed, isolated, depleted, demoralised and suffering from PTSD, and carrying layers of wounding of ancestral trauma, generational trauma, emotional neglect, and both physical and psychological abuse. Worst of all, I was suffering from a lack of parenting and leadership and an inherited ignorance that both are essential and roles we can and have to ultimately level up in and fulfil ourselves.

When you can find no one worthy to lead you, you have to become worthy to lead yourself.

Many of us arrive in the middle of our journeys having to learn skills about reparenting, emotional competence, self-love and processing that actually are not taught cohesively anywhere. Even amongst the communities and practitioners who do know how to teach such things, the idea of disintegration has not fully taken hold yet. Another truth that I arrived at almost too late was that so much of what we ascribe to poor mental health, is actually a chronic neglect of our “spiritual health”.

‘Soul’, is nothing other than the human thirst and capacity for connection and purpose, where all our creativity, vitality and inspiration stems from—from which we derive all sense of meaning. What we ail from as individuals and a society is a neglect of and absence of Soul—everything that word represents. Not only are we suffering terribly from the consequences of this condition, but we are hopelessly unaware of the causes and therefore woefully ignorant about what the most effective cures might be. Our ideas about parenting, social justice, mental health, corporate culture, relationships and now how to do business on the internet are all a symptom of that ignorance.

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them.

Thích Nhất Hạnh

Among many things that I had to do, included processing forgiveness, learning to regulate my own nervous system, understand the needs of my body, my inner child and how to practice the care of them.

To consider how poorly a modern hurried life prepares us for this apprenticeship is to begin to realise how necessary the institution of initiation is, and how our modern malaise is shaped precisely by its glaring absence.

I had to practice discernment internally as well as I had ever done externally, and I had to learn to drop the faux-nobility of what we like to imagine is a “stoic manliness”.

I had to practice and integrate vulnerability, and I had to be really frank and objective with myself about the fact that I had suffered. I had to accept the truth that I had not just had a tough time, I had, by all objective accounts, suffered a kind of abuse by society and corporate culture that was not equipped to deal with humans at all, let alone humans like me. Most of all, I had to face the implications that I had been complicit in my own wounding and lack of care.

If life has any meaning at all, it is that our wounds have meaning.

The greatest meaning we can ascribe to our wounds, and the courageous and enormous efforts we undertake to own them and heal them, is when we realise that our calling is to share the medicine with others that we have taken such great pains and endured such significant costs to discover, and practice within ourselves.

The Road to Lough Inagh, Connemara. Photo by Rocco Jarman

The Invitation.

The Invitation to the reader is to retrace your own journey in this way.

• To begin to apply the loving and discerning rigour of practising objective subjectivity. To acknowledge all your unrequitedness, all the ways in which life dealt you a hand you would not have wished on someone else, and begin to interrogate each chapter carefully to distil the lesson.

• To find a way to lean a shoulder against the door through which your own inheritance can begin to arrive and through which you can practice a more courageous form of generosity towards yourself. To audit the posture you walk with, the stance you face your own frustrations with, so that, you can walk back the ways you learned to compensate for vulnerability and lack of empowerment when you first arrived.

• To grant yourself, at last, the courage to break the small agreements you were forced to accept to broker security and that shadow reflection of belonging we normalise as young people, which leaves us with such a broken sense of identity and such warped ideas of virtue by which we torture and neglect our own true self.

• To be whole and to be home, and to accept that the hardship of the journey is matched, exactly, to the value of the prize, and the greatness of the soul who dares the way.

When I forget who I am, I follow the way.

When I remember who I am, the way and I are the same.

Yours, in infinite love and gratitude,

Rocco

p.s. May the great Medicine of Undersanding, be not the taking from you, but the giving in you, as it is for me.