Jungle Return & the Paradox of Parenthood
Jungle Return & the Paradox of Parenthood
Vulnerable heart-reflections on the Massive Initiation of 2022...
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“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
— Sigmund Freud
Well, here I sit.
In Mexico City.
7am.
Tanja and Lila are still sleeping.
I’m getting over a cold, so my throat is still kinda scratchy, and I feel rather tired.
Yet I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep.
So figured I’d write something.
In one week, I head back into the Mayan jungle of Mexico for 18 days of medicine work and nature immersion, largely cut off from the outside world.
We’re arriving a few days before Tanja’s Women Rising retreat, which I’ll be co-facilitating, then I’ll be facilitating my Presence of God retreat, with the help of Tanja and the team at Kumankaya.
I plan to mostly be offline during this time. I might schedule a post or two beforehand, so you still may hear from me during that time, but it will be words I wrote previously.
Synchronistically, I found out Jim Newman is in Mexico City hosting a radical non-duality seminar this weekend, so I plan to go to that this Friday, Saturday, Sunday, which will undoubtedly be a potent appetizer prior to the medicine work. Jim is one of the most uncompromising non-dual communicators; if you’ve never listened to his conversation with Sam Harris from a couple years ago, it’s hilarious.
Anyway…
How am I feeling right now? What’s alive?
I feel kinda like everything at once.
Up, down, left, right, backwards, forwards, diagonal, loop-the-loop.
This year has been one for the books, in terms of testing me.
It’s felt like a near-continuous massive initiation.
At times it felt like getting repeatedly karmically roundhouse-kicked in the face.
Just today I re-read something that I wrote a couple months back. I sent it to some of you who follow my Telegram but I didn’t end up sending it via newsletter at the time:
Sending Love everyone ❤️
As I'm sure all you guys have noticed I've been going through a lot of intense fluctuations this year, and went through another intense period in recent days... The energy can flip massively in the course of a single day — to feeling like an unstoppable force of nature to feeling like a puddle of shame and not-enough-ness
I believe there are also aspects of the 'immature masculine' being purged from my system / brought into the light at this time... sometimes these energies are sorta 'taking me over' so I can then gradually come to see them more clearly / bring them into the light...
A practice I want to commit to right now is to keep coming back to my heart... through heart-tapping, drinking cacao, listening to heart-opening music, opening my heart in my men's circle, and so on...
The heart knows the way, the heart is our spiritual center... I don't think it's a coincidence that I chose the name Brothers of the Ever Innocent Heart for the brotherhood I created this year...
A higher part of me helped me in choosing that name, in knowing that I myself was going to need the heart medicine of the brotherhood as much as anyone -- as well as the repeated reminder to come back to the heart
Love,
Jordan
Since writing that, the fluctuations have continued.
I’ve continued to do a lot of heart-opening practices, and those have seemed to help a lot—especially at certain breakthrough moments.
It does feel like large quantities of arrogance and immaturity needed to be basically burned out of my system this year.
It still feels like the most intense dark night took place while we were in Azores for ~4 months from late January till early June.
Since then I’ve felt like I’m gradually ‘coming out’ of the most grueling initiation, yet there have still been frequent strong echoes/revisitations of the muck of self-doubt, fear, unworthiness, shame, anger.
The Paradox of Parenthood
It does still feel like fatherhood has catalyzed a confrontation with (and gradual healing of) some of my deepest birth and early-childhood traumas this year.
The other day I wrote on IG:
“Tanja and I love our little Lila so much… sometimes parenthood is incredibly challenging, there are the most heavenly jewel-moments and ultra stressful tests multiple times per day… it’s a rollercoaster initiation. But when Lila smiles or laughs or dances or jokes or plays excitedly or hugs us or we watch her sleep, she is the most precious being and it’s all worth it”
Parenthood really is a paradox.
It’s incredible how baby Lila can go from being the most saintly, innocent buddha-elf to the most mischievous, howling rascal-banshee-guru in zero seconds flat, many times in a single day.
It’s full-on.
Bless Tanja’s heart for taking on the great majority of solo-care-time for Lila for nearly the first year of Lila’s life.
The past few months, we’ve transitioned to a shift system wherein I gradually took on more of the solo care. At present we’re now splitting the solo care time 50/50, and it’s really opened my eyes on a new level to just how full-on parenthood really is.
I love Lila so much, and yet solo-caring for her 14-month-old self 40-50 hours/week (while traveling) is way more intense and demanding than any ‘job’ I ever had. It’s exhausting and I often just want to take a nap, yet then I’ve got to find time to keep all my various creative projects and pursuits going, to keep finding ways to generate that wily ol’ thing called “money.”
Sometimes it’s a lot, fam.
And there are no days off.
It’s really given me a vastly deeper appreciation for parents and especially mothers, who have historically tended to do far more of the childcare in most cultures. I honestly have little to no idea how my grandmas raised 5 and 7 kids respectively, or how one of my great grandmas raised 15 kids.
(Don’t get me wrong, being a man/father has plenty of its own hardcore challenges too, but I think men do actually tend to greatly underestimate just how intense and crazy-making non-stop childcare actually is.)
Humans are incredibly strong and resilient.
So, anyway…
I’m a lot of things right now.
On one level my heart often feels incredibly full.
On another level I’m often really tired…
And frequently I’m mildly or majorly confused and scared about the future—where all this is going, how it’s going to turn out, whether we’re going to “find our way through.”
And of course we are, one way or another.
A deep part of me knows that.
Knows that life is unstoppable and always finds its way through, even if “finding its way through” looks pretty ugly from our human perspective.
Even in the midst of all the rollercoaster-ing, I still maintain this bone-deep sense of trust in life—a trust that there is a larger flawless harmony playing out, and that I am always receiving the exact medicine I need.
It’s still a lot sometimes, though.
And I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Human life doesn’t seem to be one of the ‘easy mode’ layers of infinite reality.
Sometimes it can be, for sure, but it seems like most human lifetimes contain their fair share of ‘nightmarish gauntlet mode.’
And that’s coming from someone who, by many people’s standards, has it all:
Beautiful little family. Freedom to travel around. Ability to do aligned work. Amazing family and friends. Vast, robust network with a lot of potential opportunities.
Who cares about a little childcare and financial uncertainty and primordial trauma healing and a civilization teetering on the brink of collapse or revolution, right?
I should just be grateful, right?
But it’s just not like that, experientially.
I am damn grateful, I give thanks all the time, usually at every meal or more, sometimes dozens of times per day.
“Thank you, God, for this beautiful life.”
Yet I am a sensitive being, and often this past year has really beaten me down. At times it’s come close to breaking me.
I’m not trying to have a pity-party or paint myself as a victim. Just trying to tell it like it is.
I needed this.
I do really feel that.
A lot of my adult life was kinda like an archetypal Peter Pan flowboi-foxtrot around the globe.
Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of pain at times. ~6 terrible romantic heartbreaks. Years of crushing guilt. A few terrifying psychedelic journeys. Etc.
But in hindsight a lot of it was also quite smooth and flow-y and groovy and insulated from a lot of the challenges most people face in life.
By most people’s standards, I was ridiculously free for the better part of a decade.
Then fatherhood, long-term partnership, and family life came along…
And BAM!!
Things changed massively overnight.
Suddenly, I had real responsibility.
A helpless little angel being depending on me.
I had to grow the fuck up real fast.
And I guess that’s what’s been happening.
Growing up.
Initiation into adulthood.
Our culture has largely forgotten how to initiate us into adulthood, but life hasn’t forgotten.
Apparently, life needs me to be an adult for the rest of this lifetime.
Small tears well in my eyes as I write that, because I guess some part of me just really fucking did not ever want to grow up.
Growing up is not glamorous. It’s uncomfortable, raw, intense. It hurts. Large parts of you have to die, or at least metamorphose.
So I guess I’m still sitting in the simmering soup of that.
Of being sorta blindsided by a “grow the fuck up NOW”-type process.
And now Lila is babbling in the other room.
And Tanja is asking me to take her, because it’s my shift.
So I guess it’s time to stop writing.
And change a morning diaper.
And get back to bittersweet grown-up things.
I’m happy to go see Lila now.
She’s especially precious right when she wakes up.
Love,
J
“When you discover that the non-bliss is bliss too, then you’re home-free.”
— Peter Brown, This That Is