Life Review

I have examined and reviewed my life yet again.

On the negative side:

1. I continue to have guilt and shame about sexual behaviour in the past and ongoing concerns and confusion. I recall this theme in my earliest teen age journals. I loved Portnoy’s Complaint, a classic in therapy novels. No I didn’t masturbate on the family Hamm. I have however broken many societal taboos though not the law per se. I have been punished considerably for my transgression by ostracization, physical abuse and major financial losses. I feel now I’m in my 60’s I should really lighten up on myself.  I have been accepting and understanding and non judgemental of others. I have friends from the tightest to the lowest expression. I don’t think of them sexually when I’m with them. I don’t ogle or demean them.  I believe that I put myself under a microscope in this regard and need to be less judgemental of myself.  

The golden key is ‘Love God.  Love thy neighbour as yourself”.  On this scale, a spiritual likkert scale as it were I’m well advanced on the ‘love thy neighbour but need to be more loving of myself.  

I love the expression that I shouldn’t judge people who sin differently.  We live in a world of sinners, Sinners Anonymous central really.  I mustn’t accept societals’ confusion in this regard anymore than I accept societal’s even greater fixation with war and violence.

2. I continue to be lacking in gratitude. I have by outward standards the greatest life. I’d want none other . Yet rather than celebrating what I have I’m always focusing on what I want and what I don’t have even though at this point in life I’ve mostly had what I don’t have today sometime in the past.  I really do need to be more grateful.

3.  I have clutter. I love the minimalist life and have lived Walden Pond with great joy. I see that when I’ve been more at peace with myself with less ‘business’ ‘chasing the dollar’ ‘responding to everyone elses’ ‘emergencies’ ‘threats’ ‘demands’, I’ve been happiest and loved life more .  I need to mosey more in that direction away from those threatening bullying cowardly forces that so negatively influence me.

4. I have since a child not been anti authority but keenly aware of ‘abuse of power’ . I was asked once why I was in so many fights. Mostly I have been defending others from bullying, attacks, gross misjustice. I have brought tremendous abuse on myself , usually indirect for getting in the way of corruption.  I feel I’m too old to be helping so many underdogs and want to give up the torch to some younger folk but I see the younger people brain washed and propagandize by these very bullies who were there when I was in the peace march, who demanded I work long hours and weekends and evening  for their profit.  I don’t know what to do about this.  I fear for my future and the future of those aging in Canada right now.  I don’t know I’ll have any worldly knights but trust I will have angels and have known God’s protection. Yet the abuses I’ve seen of the old and sick concern me and I’m aging and seeing obvious things, rich fat cat incompetent undertrained totally political hospital administrations who can’t even make room for the patients but instead have used hall ways for decades.  I was promised hospital beds and investigations for my patients and downstream psychologists and counselling but it’s not materialized.  It’s mismanaged and misused with “Marx turning Engels on his head’. The least trained least experienced have the greatest control and power and financial reward while those like me with the greatest training greatest experience and most evidence of excellence have been stripped of our leadership role so that a political administrative class can grow like cancer.  I have seen this theme grow in the last 10 years.

5. I have been political this last 4 years feeling that a PM who admits to being impaired mentally, criminal in his behaviour and generally having only ‘dynastic’ ‘brand’ power and a corrupt Quebec mafia lead power base is doing egregious harm to the economy and my patients , the marginalized. His drug addiction and flaunting it with profit driven ‘legalization ‘ of drugs (not decriminalization as we all supported) is directly impacting on me. I smoked marijuana and drank wine. I paid a million dollars in time and money and activity because I was honest and upfront about my use of substance though I was never ever as impaired as the PM and truly not as arrogant or offensive. It is karma to see aspects of myself on big stage and I want never to be so insensitive to others as I was at times. I am thankful that I have not smoked marijuana or cigarettes in 22 years.  I gave up alcohol not because I drank more or excessively but that I binged and when I did on holidays mostly I picked up smoking and did things I wouldn’t have done sober. I took ‘unnecessary risks’ when drinking though if the truth be known I had immense pleasures. The smoking was killing me and I couldn’t stay quit smoking nicotine or marijuana because I’d pick it up drinking.  I see our leadership as commonly impaired by drugs and alcohol and other addictions. I don’t like it. It’s been an issue for me politically the last 5 years. I am ‘critical’ of politics and politicians and would be more celebratory of those who do good. It’s in this one arena that I have to change. If the Liberals were to win I’d want to leave Canada. I can’t stand seeing this country I love destroyed like Venezuela or Russia.  I don’t want to grow old here. I don’t feel safe here any more.  I see this involvement in politics with political affiliation, voting and financial contribution as a ‘active democrat’.  I am a participant. I see a lot who criticize but don’t take a stand. When you stand up you make yourself a target.  I used to love sitting on the fence, the safe and cowardly position of the ‘agnostic’ and the person who ‘likes all parties a bit’.  I would appreciate a better legal and political system but am an active member of the one we have now. I’m a realist. I have gone door to door, sat on phones, and participated in all levels of government seeing it as ‘dutiful’.  Facebook critics are painful children in most part many not diaper trained, all talk and no action.  I’m not. I’ve been billy clubbed and the freedoms others have today I’ve contributed to their having in action and financially.  I know who cares by where and what they put their money on. Most people only care for themselves and their immediate families, like animals.

6. I have tried to ‘love my enemies.’  I’m doing better at this and at forgiving but I remain vengeful and fearful. Though frankly it’s been a long time since I woke people in their bedrooms late at night to ‘discuss their problem’.  I’ve not cased peoples residences and routes in decades. I’m just trying not to ‘rent a space in my brain for free’ for them now mostly. I’m trying to focus on the positive.  I’m seeing in my thoughts and feelings and what comes uppermost in my mind about people especially those who have stolen my money and my time by betrayal and greed and dishonesty remain a sore spot despite having 4th stepped and prayed and given them over to God. I keep picking up the sore like the good Irish Scottish blooded person I have. I even hope that their will be an amnesty on my ‘forgiving sort’ and we’ll have an ‘open season’ on our enemies so I can hunt down and torture and kill those still living. Few are still living. The fact is I rather like those that hurt me too. The older I get this individuals who caused me grief seem more human and I have little anger at them The ‘institutions’ and those in them that abused their power or failed in their duties, those I still loathe.  I recognize that these insitutions are critical and important but object to the ‘systems’ as they multiply errors so easily and their lack of transparency make them really sick.  Corruption is evil. Yet compared to other countries and other systems this isn’t so bad though I fear it’s present detour into increasing madness.

On the positive side:

1. My life has been blessed untoward by loving parents, family, and teachers and friends and mentors and learning. I’ve really been able to meet and know the greatest and for every ‘glych’ in the relationships there’s been a million benefits. My perception and fear and resentment have been the problem. Even ‘breaking up’ with girls I’ve lacked knowledge and finesse to do it more ‘smoothly’ less hurtfully , more kindly. Looking back I see that we were unable to resolve differences and that while we shared the ‘broad strokes’ the devil was in the details’. I married for children and felt a wife or two wanted to be the ‘child’.  I had these great ‘buddies’ and still do.  I’ve been blessed with companions.  I’m so thankful to have know such incredible loves. I’ve done 10 years of monogamy and committed adultery and been cuckolded and tried a threesome and experienced sex with men and been transvestic but the best love and sex was in a loving monogamous marriage yet the worst love and sex were in monogamous loving marriage.  I loved the Art of Loving. Falling in love and marriage is great but divorce is the nightmare.  I understand people today not wanting to risk but know that without risk there can never been the greatest gains. So single people seem mostly to have safe shallow lives’ lives of quiet desperation’.  I’ll always love that I’ve loved and lost and feel only sadness for those who never played the game.  

2. I have had great adventures.  I’ve been blessed to study at the university. I’ve never got over the joy of looking in my first electron microscope. I’m still delighted to take a history and physical and see my findings ‘confirmed’ by lab and testing like MRI’s . I love the pictures. But it’s only been first through history that 90% have arisen and 9% through physical. Only 1% or less of the time has a ‘lab’ result ‘surprised me’.  The lab has in 40 years of medicine served only to ‘confirm’ my diagnosis and provide direction to therapy. Today I’m a better diagnosticician than I ever was because today I’m the best diagnostician I know, like the teachers of old I so admired.  But I don’t have time.  I’m denied collateral. I’m surrounded by doctors with no time and consults that are deceitful and withholding. I’m routinely finding that the patients don’t want their doctors to know things or their insurance company or courts or lawyers. This deceitfulness double and triples the time I spend. Malingering and factitious disorders and sociopathy are fueled by the system and the College of Physicians and Surgeons is collectively hurting patients and medicine by their self serving rigidity.  They’re 19th century in a 21st century world. I’ve been blessed to be at the front lines where I can see the 21st century. I’m in the present and this is a blessing. I’m very thankful for this in work. I’ve seen amazing cures in cancer and other infectious diseases. I’ve seen the advances in AIDs treatment and in diagnostic clarification and treatment and surgery and stem cell research. I can see a patient who would have died a decade ago live. I can think of the many patietns I knew who died because they had illnesses which we had no cure for at the time. I can see schizophrenics having good lives and people being cured of strokes who’d have dragged limbs or been in wheel chairs int he past. It’s exciting to be here seeing this NASA like world of science and the breakthroughs every day.

I have had the adventures in travel, canoeing, hiking, bicycling across Europe, sailing the west coast then sailing solo in winter hurricanes to the Hawaii Islands, sailing back with crew.  I’ve driving cars and vans across Canada and the northern states, motorcycling to Sturges and back 5000 km, and flying to most continents, going to countries I only dreamed of.  I love camping. I love my camper. I ve been so blessed.

3. I’ve had a rich spiritual life, with out of body experience, experience of parallel spiritual realms, encounters with angels, seeing heaven, visitations from the dead, countless and relatively routine mystical insights and experiences.  Even being ‘psychologically minded’ has meant I’ve been able to tolerate the tension of opposites. I’ve been able to work and succeed in this limited physical world while aware of the greater world. I’ve been truly a spiritual being living a material existence and had many reminders of this especially when I’ve lost track. I’ve a deep relationship with God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and am thankful. I’ve had access to immense spiritual resources and advanced training in Church and University and Ashrams and Monasteries. I’ve been touched by holy men and women. I’ve prayed and meditated and followed in the paths of those who have lead so well.

4. I’ve had these great pets and raised animals and plants and so enjoyed nature. I’ve delivered a hundred babies and been with as many dying. I’ve been a child therapist, a family therapy, a group therapist and marriage therapist and individual therapist. I’ve walked together with people through so many aspects of their lives and been blessed to mostly help. I’ve been a highly recognisd profession and spoken at national and international conferences and been published locally, nationally and internationally. It’s been great to do these journeys with the presence of a loyal dog and cat, even now Gilbert blind goes everywhere with me, my therapy dog and so uplifting to patients and friends.  

5. Ive played games and sports and gone to great concerts and played guitar and sung alone and in groups and in choirs. I’ve dance and taught dancing. I’ve acted. I’ve fought and done martial arts. I’ve been very active and very much driven to be the best I can be, competing mostly with myself and rarely with others.  

I have had a truly blessed life and wonderful family, friends, teachers and pets.  If I was a better person more kind and more joyful I’d have got more out of this gift of a life. I’m still feeling like I’ve been given a jet plane and I’ve been mostly taxi ing it about the tarmac. I look forward to really flying. Astroprojection. Out of body and levitation are minor ‘tastes’ of understanding ‘gravity’ and going beyond it. I love it explained in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  “Anyone can walk on air but they mustn’t think about doing it’.  As the Bible says ‘if you have the faith of a mustard seed you can move a mountain’. I do want to increase my faith.  I am of too little faith. I’m right now studying Doubting Thomas.  It’s a good start to my next stage of growth personally and spiritually

Thank you God. 

Self Realization Fellowship Encinitas California

Maija, my first mother in law, introduced me to Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda in the early 70’s. .  I later came across the book as the only eastern writing of note in the chapel library of University of Winnipeg which had begun as a United Church seminary education facility.
Contacting Self Realization in Encinitas I began their weekly study.  The 70’s was an exciting time in my life. I’d married the most beautiful dancer in the world and bicycled with her across Europe before studying dance for a year in London. I’d return to study arts and sciences before experiencing a calling to  medicine praying in the University of Winnipeg Chapel.  All the while I was teaching dancing evenings at Arthur Murray’s and Fred Astaires.
I attribute my meditation practice in those early years to my having the focus and discipline to complete my medical studies.  I belonged to a small meditation group that met weekly in the home of one of the members of the  symphony. I forget this name sadly. He taught me the Harmonium so I could lead chants when he wasn’t available. I actually ordered my own harmonium from Bombay and later met the harmonium salesman when I visited Bombay.  He remembered that order well. He said, “We never received an order for an harmonium from Canada.”  I remember well one unforgettable day meditating in Winnipeg with that group from sun up to sun down.
Eastern studies and yoga were not like they are today. True the Beatles had studied with Mahareesh Yogi. George Harrison had put out “My Sweet Lord.”  My friend Kirk had left Baiba and I  at the Strawberry Peace and Love Festival to dance with the Boy Guru followers, later becoming a Prem disciple. Baiba and I had gone on to San Francisco to dance in the streets and  ‘wear flowers in our hair." I believe Kirk’s  family was Anglican. Mine was Baptist though I later taught Sunday school for the Fort Garry United Church. I came under the amazing direction of the saintly genius Dr. Carl Ridd.  A former basketball star he’d become a University of Winnipeg Literature and Religious Studies professor.
I liked that Paramahansa Yogananda had been India’s delagate to the World Congress of Religious Liberals in the United States.   This was an Ecumenical Religious Conference. Vivekananda had been at the first in the late 1900’s meeting and influencing Emerson, the father of American philosophy.  He's lent  his Walden Pond home to Thoreau.  of ‘civil disobedience’ fame.  It’s a small world.
I became a Kriya Yoga initiate in Toronto in the 70’s but only years later made my way to Encinitas California years. It was a moving first visit.
I stopped doing Kriya Yoga when I smoked marijuana remembering that I thought this was a faster way to ‘feeling at peace’.  It was also a ‘tantra yoga’ path in my mind as well.  I had become less spiritual and more an ‘intellectual’ then studying philosophy, politics, psychiatry and medicine.
Indeed studying Freudian psychoanalysis at the University of Manitoba in my psychiatry residency I was told by my professor to stop meditating as it ‘was harmful for the mind’.  Smoking dope was not considered such at the time by my teachers.  So I dutifully stopped meditation but began to study the medical and psychiatric evidence in favour of it before considering that particular professor sadly wrong and rather egotistical as well.
It turned out that Herbert Benson, MD had extensively studied the benefits physically and psychologically at Harvard.  The evidence of benefit was overwhelming. I’d fallen out of the discipline and wouldn’t return to meditation myself extensively until I got into recovery a decade later. I had indeed learned the benefits for psychoanalysis more from ongoing psychiatric psychotherapy and from psychotherapist friends Dr. Miller and Dr. Christiensen.    That didn’t interfere with my becoming a wine connoisseur with my Napa Valley friend and definitely an authority on marijuana.
I was studying prayer in recovery at the time and was again cautioned against meditation. So I began researching meditation in the Christian tradition and began meditating with a Benedictine monk. It turned out that the second oldest Christian prayer, the Dessert Father prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ,son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’ was taught as a meditation first by St. Augustine. It turned out that meditation has a rich history in the mystical and spiritual Christian and Catholic traditions that followed from St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Chross. “Nada" is as simple an affirmative mantra meditation as anyone could wish.
Meanwhile I’d been very thankful to learn the value and depth of prayer by focusing on this more than meditation. Dr. James Houston and Dr. Willie Gutowski are great teachers of prayer.  “Transforming Power of Prayer, Deepening Your Friendship with God” by Dr. James Houston is my all time favourite writing on prayer. In 12 step programs, known for their rough simplicity, meditation is called ‘listening to God’ and prayer is called ‘talking to God’.  They really are not separate.
I loved walking into the Self Realization retreat centre this visit. . There were monks and volunteers there cleaning and caring for the facility. I spoke to a couple and they reminded me of the monks I’d now had the priviledge of meeting around the world in my travels. There is something wondrous and peaceful about these soulful people. I still recall fondly the Greek Orthodox monk in Meteora who gave me a cookie and sat with me for a time.  I’ve prayed and meditated in so many churches, temples and shrines.
Its was from Yogananda’s writings I learned the prayers, “Saints of all religions, I bow to you all, may thy love shine forever on the sanctuary of my devotion and may I be able to awaken thy love in all hearts. "
I was blessed to recently hear Dr. James Houston bemoan the intellectual difficulties that Christians get into when they start discussing how many angels can fit on the head of a needle.  I’d been asking him about the division between the Orthodox Christian Communion and the Roman Catholic Communion regarding the origin of the Holy Spirit. The Roman Catholic maintains that it comes from the Father and the Son while the Orthodox maintains it comes from the Father directly.  It’s such elements of human pride that cause divisions in churches and keep churches, and nations and continents apart.  The Sunni and Shiite division is about as silly to the outside as divisions in Judaism or among Buddhists ,some of whom are strict vegetarians while others eat meat but do not kill it themselves. Dr. Houston focussed on the love of God in his writings and teachings, seeing love as central to ‘spiritual christianity’.
I suspect that Dr. Houston would agree though that the trouble with too open a mind is that one’s marbles can fall out. He’s so very kind to me that  sometimes I fear he thinks I’ve lost one or two.
I loved that Paramahansa Yoganada also focused on the heart.  His whole relationship with God was as a love song, like the Song of Songs of the Old Testament or the writings of the Sufi, Rumi.  I was introduced to Tagore, who my poet friend Bernice Lever loves,  by my studies in the 70’s.  I loved hearing his songs sung there when I visited Bombay in the mid 80’s.  I had the same joyous feeling hearing Leonard Cohen’s songs in the taxis of  Tel Aviv.  Today I love Hallelujah but nothing lifts me up so much as the music of Third Day who I was truly blessed to hear in concert in Abbotsford. It was like the other special night listening to Stephen Bell in St. John’s Church Chilliwack.  After travelling around the world visiting sacred sitesand talking with world church leaders I so often find that it’s right at home where the heart is that God may speak the loudest and softest if one is listening.
I loved sitting and drinking in the peaceful easy feelings that linger in the SRF Encinitas temple.  I meditated there once again. Then I  joined up with Laura who’d been waiting in the car with Gilbert so we could both go into the remarkable SRF gift shop.  Gift shops are so much fun. We were so pleased to find the perfect pillows, little elephants for gifts, a favourite Yoganada book of writings, and a  pink shirt for Laura from India.
The International Society of Addiction Medicine is meeting in New Delhi in 2019 and I hope to be going so I can take a side tour and visit the Ranchi Ashram of the Yogoda Satanga Society, Indian affiliate of the Self Realization Fellowship.  I’ve been following the journeys of St. Thomas of the Syriac church who made it as far as Kerala and would like to visit a church there as well.
There is a place where  Hinduism and Christianity meet which to my mind is where Buddhism,Judaism, Janism, Paganism ,Islam, Sufiism and all religions touch in the great Venn Diagram of God’s love. It’s not the superstitious fear but that place of awe and wonder and humility.
I once explained it to my two young friends, one Sik and one  Catholic friends when we were out hunting partridge.  "I believe”, I said, " all roads lead to Rome but as an Anglican I believe that I’ll find an even better mansion than my mother’s baptist mansion while you and all the other non Christians will have mansions in heaven, but just not in the best part. Location. Location. Location.”  The truth be told my favourite heaven is found in Mark Twain’s  Captain Stormfield’s visit to heaven’
I was a vegetarianism for years when I practiced Kriya Yoga. My aboriginal friends and I today would say vegetarianism is an old Indian name for ‘poor hunter’. For many historically and culturally meat was reserved for the wealthy while the poor had to make a virtue of necessity. That said when my friend Ganesh’s wife Anita does her classic Indian vegetarian cooking I could see becoming a vegetarian again.
It was uplifting and moving to be once again at the Encinitas Retreat centre.  I am so thankful.  Yognanda’s books still have a special place at Banyan Books in Vancouver.