Ley Lines of Love (eBook)

Introduction

Ever since ancient times when people gathered around campfires under the stars, they have been storytellers. Stories weave connection, inspire, and reassure us. We hunger for stories and for the connection that joins heart with heart.

In your hands you hold the story of a spiritual journey, one that started very early and remained persistent throughout my life. Now in my mid-eighties, I’m sitting around that virtual campfire with you, eager to share an assortment of stories I could never have imagined decades ago. Many are inspiring. Some are heartbreaking. Others are groundbreaking. All brought immeasurable gifts—including the dark ones. That would be an important learning—how to discover the gold that lies hidden in the dark ground of suffering.

The stories have an urgency about them. Why? We live in exceptionally dramatic, challenging, and frightening times. Our hearts break as we watch the destruction of our beloved planet and the cascade of other perils—totalitarian leaders, pervasive racism, climate catastrophes, war, and endless violence.

How do our stories hold the enormity of all these challenges? Besides the social and political actions that we might take, we need to come home to ourselves—to our core of basic goodness, resilience, and compassion. Only that can carry us through the storms that beset us. We need to tend the fires of the heart and find an inner refuge, cultivating qualities that nurture kindness and courage. This is the inner journey, urgently calling in ways that will be unique for each of us.

At the outset, I want to comment on the much-used word spiritual, which should be differentiated from the word religion, which refers to the doctrinal and institutional forms created by different religious traditions. On the other hand, anything that touches on the mysteries of life, the invisible, or the exploration of consciousness might be referred to as spiritual in nature. Whatever our views, this is an inviting, wide-open subject to contemplate.

My story starts just before World War II and continues now into this second decade of the twenty-first century. I seem to have been born with an undying curiosity to understand the mystery in which we live: where we come from, including our ancestry; and the perennial questions of identity—who am I? Where am I going? And above all, what is the meaning of this life?

The seeds of spiritual curiosity were there in my early childhood, but the first big leap of my journey happened when I was seventeen and met my first spiritual teacher, a charismatic preacher, church founder, author, and mystic named Howard Thurman. I had attended various Christian churches and listened to many ministers, but I’d never experienced anyone remotely like Howard. With his warmth, hearty laugh, and great heart, he seemed enlivened by the stream of spiritual energy that flowed through him, permeating his presence and inspiring his words. Undoubtedly this came from his heritage. As the grandson of a slave, his rise to prominence was remarkable in the mid-1950s.

The next surprising milestone came in my mid-twenties when I was seriously on the prowl for a prospective husband. I was in graduate school at Columbia University. At a small dinner gathering, I met a man who, though very well dressed in a tailored suit, had secured his silk tie with a paper clip instead of with the gold tie clip more appropriate for his handsome attire. His dark, wavy hair was streaked with grey. He was good-looking with an expressive, exceptionally mobile face. His wide forehead had an intricate pattern of lifelines, suggesting that he had been through a lot in his forty-one years. I also noticed that he had beautiful hands with long tapered fingers, perhaps those of a musician or artist. To me, he was an older man, fourteen years my elder in fact, far too old for my taste.

Although our intriguing conversation about philosophical questions piqued my interest, I couldn’t imagine anything further happening with this unusual man. Nonetheless, Harrison Hoblitzelle, known informally as “Hob,” followed up after that evening.

His idea of a first date was to take me to lunch at the Faculty Club at Columbia University where I was impressed to learn that he was both teaching and Director of Academic Placement. Over lunch, he suggested that I read Alan Watts’s book Nature, Man and Woman. I’d never even heard of Alan Watts. He handed me a copy and explained that this elegant book could change the way we think, feel, and love. That was a startling statement! Furthermore, Hob continued, the book challenged the assumptions of Western culture and introduced the principles of Chinese Taoism. All this was a totally new world to me. I was both daunted and intrigued.

That was the unlikely beginning of our relationship. Subtly luring me into his world, he sent me off to learn awareness practices with an eccentric German woman; he strongly encouraged me to take voice lessons with his Italian voice teacher; and, most astonishing of all—because he thought I had “a few things to work on”—he sent me off to his shrink. Who was this man who seemed to be subjecting me to some kind of makeover job?

Entangled with all my judgments about how unusual this relationship was, I continued to wobble and question. Hob simply didn’t fit my preconceptions about the kind of man I would marry, and I still felt the pull of an earlier love. I found it eccentric that he never explicitly asked me to marry him. Nevertheless, intrigued, challenged, and lured onward, I could hardly believe how fast my life was unfolding. Because of my indecision, Hob instigated a separation. Astonishing me, because I’d never experienced rejection, he announced simply, “If you return, you’ll know what it means.”

After three weeks of separation, I returned, my decision based on a dream about a wedding. The compelling image was of a champagne glass in which appeared a large, luminous star radiating brilliant light in all directions. That luminous star arose from my soul, and I followed it. This was the unlikely start to our marriage, which was to be an extraordinary, lifelong spiritual partnership.

Olivia and Harrison (Hob) in the early 1990s

Thus began our journey. We were to bring up our two children, Ethan and Laura,1 through mostly delightful family years, though definitely enlivened by the inevitable squabbles of siblings and parents. Although Hob was intellectually inclined with a PhD in Comparative Literature, he was, at heart, an adventurer of the spirit. That’s what had captivated me and what had drawn us together, because those essential questions about life fueled my quest.

Young family: Hob, Olivia, Ethan (age 7), and Laura (age 4)

Starting in the 1960s, a wide assortment of new movements blossomed—political, psychological, and spiritual—many involving explorations of consciousness in various forms. There was a veritable explosion of experimentation, much of it pushing the boundaries of mainstream culture. Hob and I were right in the middle of all of it. Together in the early ‘70s, we started by getting initiated in Transcendental Meditation, and then moved on to explore Zen Buddhism. We attended sesshins2 (meditation retreats) at a neighborhood Zen Center where the Zen master, carrying a long, flat-sided stick, would walk slowly around the room of meditators. If you bowed to him as he stood in front of you, he’d whack you on the shoulder to wake you up from your wandering, undisciplined meditations. That practice was definitely bizarre, but I loved the dignity of the place, the formalities of practice, and the profound silence that permeated our days.

We then discovered Vipassana, also known as insight meditation, from the Theravada tradition, a form of Buddhist practice primarily from South Asia. That was to become the most adaptable form of meditation for Western culture. As a profound path leading to deep spiritual awakening, one aspect of Vipassana was encapsulated in the word mindfulness and led to the stress management movement eventually taught in organizations, schools, churches, government agencies, and even the U.S. military. I was to become a pioneer in this movement, surprising even myself when I ended up teaching Behavioral Medicine, also called Mind/Body Medicine, at a major Boston hospital. This was the crowning phase in my career where my love of both meditation and psychology finally came together.

Like several turning points in my career, this professional leap came by invitation, not because I had sought it out. In a similar way, in my early forties when I started getting involved in the encounter group movement, I decided to train in psychology and group work. Before I’d even received my degree, I was being asked to co-lead groups with leaders in the field, pioneers such as Morrie Schwartz, lionized through the book Tuesdays with Morrie; and Philip Slater, expert in group process and author of the underground bestseller The Pursuit of Loneliness. Participants in these groups began asking if they could see me for individual therapy. Without having made any career decision, I found myself with a private practice in psychotherapy, seeing individuals and couples, and co-leading groups. It seemed as though I’d fallen backward into my next career.

Parallel with becoming a therapist, when I’d been practicing Vipassana meditation for some years, I was invited to teach meditation in various organizational settings,...