Manila Dreams #12
Manila Dreams #12
The basic re-integration is complete. Moving into intermediate and advanced. Basically, the unasked question is: what would I have been had I been raised in a loving, intact family with healthy male and female role models and energies? What would I have been if raised in a society that loved and supported me, right down to the root of my being rather than doing all it could to destroy and distort those roots?
The beautiful people of the Philippines remember who they are, and because of decades of MA training I was able to flow into their energetic matrix, presented with open arms. There were two major areas of damage in my life (familial and societal) and they are both healing. “Little Stevie” got a knife. I’m telling you that was unexpected.
And he ALSO has brought “his” mother and father into the heartspace, with the belief that the family damage was CAUSED by the societal damage. Is that true? I honestly don’t know, but it is reasonable to believe some of that damage that destroyed their marriage was the result of external factors, yes. How much? Impossible to say. But enough that little Stevie is convinced that that’s the case, and I don’t argue with a six-year-old with a Karambit.
What next? Hell if I know. This is new territory. What would I have been? While it is true that I’ve adjusted, and found my way (spending incalculable amounts of time and energy on therapy, gurus, yoga, martial arts, biofeedback, NLP and on and on) it is glaringly obvious that EVERY generation attempts to pass its privilege and advantage on to the next. Even the wealthy people who deliberately leave no money to their children have left something more important: a clear road map of how to succeed. They believe that they would be weakening their kids to give them “too much” and I can see that.
But the worse alternative, by far, is to give them too little, if that damages their physical, emotional, or mental development. So yeah, there are ways I’m just fine, but it is unreasonable to think I’d be less healthy if my father had been there to protect me, and help me model healthy manhood and a healthy marriage.
It is even more insane to believe that somehow the social pressures I felt provided some advantage: you can simply look at the statistics on things like inherited wealth, net worth, infant mortality and mortality to see that such pressures cripple. I overcame them, yes. At fantastic cost.
It is vastly easier to stand on your parents’ shoulders, if they are strong. Vastly easier to succeed if society says “follow this path, do the work, and join your successful tribe”. I can specifically quantify the damage, and no one can convince me otherwise, in spite of total bullshit I heard growing up trying to say my success is evidence there was no problem to begin with.
What an amazing, self-serving, bigoted and damaging attitude, often offered as if it was a complement.
Who would I have been? I have to be proud and happy and grateful for who I am, which means being grateful even for the damage and oppression. I can do that, because it motivated me to search out the experts who could heal me.
But…would I wish that on my son? My daughter? HELL NO. So the “Gratitude” thing is tricky, and I have to be careful how I hold that in my heart. And remember the very people who benefitted by my exclusion would LOVE for me to think they did me a favor. Let’s them off the hook.
Screw that. I am what I am, and had I had those advantages everyone tries to give their kids I’d be further along in life, I have zero question. So what do I do now?
Love and accept my life as it is, love people knowing that they, and I, have always done the best we could with the resources we have…but that Manila provided something I’d never seen or experienced:
A map to what the martial arts really provide: not just security of body, but of heart and mind and family and culture. The sense that, yes, they have guns, but if they come into my house, those guns won’t help them if I can strike within 1/2 second. THAT is a very different attitude and feeling. And I was surrounded by it. And welcomed into it.
This is “awakening” on a deeper level. Not “enlightenment” (that is detectable by deep and abiding non-dualistic thought that has no preferences for “this” over “that.” Very different, trust me) but my eyes are now open to colors I never saw, my ears open to sounds I never heard.
The flow of natural life is DIFFERENT from what I was offered in America, and once seen cannot be unseen. I love my country, make no mistake. But I love life, and love, and REALITY even more.
And for the first time in my life, I was given a glimpse of what could have been. It will recede: such glimpses “heal back up” inevitably. But they change you, forever. And all the resistance I got? All the expense of time, energy, money, and fear that it cost me to go?
That, in some ways, was to get my attention. To be damned sure I noticed what was happening, and didn’t just think I was having a “martial tourism” experience.
But yeah…if I’d just been able to go, without all of that, it would imply that my life was healthy, and integrated, in a way it was not. And I’d still be ahead of where I am.
Its all right. Life isn’t what you desire for it to be. Its just what it is.
And I really, truly, deeply love it, and am grateful for all of it.
But yeah….hell if I’d let Jason go through it. That’s how a people end up running in circles. Life is a spiral, not a circle, and you are either rising or sinking.
This…was a win. Major. Life changing. If I’m wise enough to see and feel it clearly.
And I do.
Namaste
Steve