I just heard Bruce Springsteen say something that stopped me in my tracks. He said:
“… the price we pay as a society for our toxic individualism and patriarchy is our permanent estrangement from one another. If I can’t connect to you, I can’t connect to us. Whether it’s racism, class differences, or any of myriad other social plagues, its cost is always the same: a broken and dysfunctional system that prevents us from recognizing and caring for our neighbor with a flawed but full heart.”
Heart, brimming. Mind, blown.
No wonder they call him The Boss.
So, allow me to put this into a little bit greater context.
The essence of any practice is interpersonal work. I relate to the wise words of one of my most influential teachers Judeth Hanson Lasater who said, “All my gurus share my last name.”
In other words, there’s positively no greater laboratory than intimate and personal relationships to do the arduous but joyful work of transforming into who we are destined to become.
To that end, my wife and I love to read or listen to books that help us to stretch into the people and the couple that we are destined to be. Currently we are reading the book US by Terry Real. It’s about evolving past a you-and-me kind of mentality into a deeper relationship that builds an “US.” This has immense personal benefit as well as benefit for any couple.
I have found Terry Real’s other stuff astoundingly insightful and directly applicable and even just a few chapters in, I would recommend US to anyone interested in uncovering then working through the unconscious programming we acquire as kids and perpetuate forward into our current relationships and to our own communities, partners, and kids, often with difficult or disastrous results for ourselves and our nearest and dearest. This book is designed to help us confront, then move past, our old ghosts, break the cycle of negative coping behaviors, and finally start acting like functional and emotionally healthy adults for feck sake!
One of the reasons this idea of US impressed me so much is because, kinda what The Boss was saying in not so many words, is that as we learn to see ourselves as an “US” in our most personal relationships, by extension we simultaneously discover how humanity is an “US.”
Learning this lesson is how the world transforms from the you vs me mentality, through the you and me mentality, into the apotheosis of human relationship which is the US reality. “US” is Oneness. Doing so heals us from the natural but terminal human malady of the illusion of separateness. Doing so wakes us up to the truth of what I call our Both And Nature: I am you and me AND everything else.
Cool. What does this have to do with The Boss?
Well, I love The Boss, the one and only Bruce Springsteen. So, what could be better than an incredible book like US than US with a forward written by the one and only Bruce Springsteen? That’s right. Perhaps the thing I love most about Bruce is his powerful and well-crafted lyrics. It’s no surprise, then, that his forward to this powerful book is also well-crafted and powerful.
I was recently at the gym listening to this book and Bruce’s words popped into my AirPods and completely arrested me, leaving me standing there looking vacantly into my gym locker. As people were pumping iron all around me my mind was pumping the simple thought, “This is incredible! I gotta share this with everyone I know.”
And so I am taking the liberty of sharing this with you. Here is the forward in its entirety which I found on Oprah’s website:
By my early thirties, I’d become aware enough to know, as things stood, I’d never have the things I wanted. A full life, a home, a wholeness of being, a companion, and a place in a community of neighbors and friends all seemed beyond my grasp. I didn’t have the judgment, the courage, or the skills to bring a real life to fruition. I was one of the most successful musicians on the planet, but work is work, life is life, and they are not the same. Even more frustrating, the things that made me good at my job—my easy tolerance, even hunger, for the isolation of creativity, my ability to comfortably and deeply reside within myself and put all my energy into my work for days, weeks, years at a time—doomed my personal life to failure. I lived a lonely but seemingly secure existence. Then at thirty-two I hit an emotional wall and realized I was lost in a deep dark forest, largely of my own making, without a map. So began forty years of trying to find my way through the shadowed trees, down to the river of a sustaining life.
With help I realized, in early middle age, that I was subject to a legacy that had been passed down from generations in my Italian-Irish family. A long and stubborn stream of mental illness and dysfunction manifested itself in my life as a deep, recurring depression and an emotional paralysis. I had a fear of exposing my inner life to anyone besides twenty thousand complete strangers at your nearest arena. The eye-to-eye democracy of real adult love struck fear and insecurity deep in my heart. Meanwhile I could feel my life clock ticking on the things I wanted to do and what I wanted to become.
So how do you transform that legacy? How do you break the chain of trauma and illness whose price is compounded with each successive generation? As Terry says, “Family pathology is like a fire in the woods taking down all in front of it until someone turns to face the flames.” Slowly I began to face those flames, mainly because I couldn’t stand the idea of failing my own children, my family, in the manner that I felt I’d been failed. And at the end of the day, the way we honor our parents and their efforts is by carrying on their blessings and doing our best to not pass forward their troubles, their faults, to our own children. Our children’s sins should be their own. It’s only through the hard work of transformation do those of ours who have come before cease to be the ghosts that haunt us and transform into the ancestors we need and love to walk beside us. Working even a small piece of this into my life took a long time, and I’m still a daily work in progress. My children will have plenty of work to do on their own, but we all have to learn and earn our own adulthood.
Looking more broadly, the price we pay as a society for our toxic individualism and patriarchy is our permanent estrangement from one another. If I can’t connect to you, I can’t connect to us. Whether it’s racism, class differences, or any of myriad other social plagues, its cost is always the same: a broken and dysfunctional system that prevents us from recognizing and caring for our neighbor with a flawed but full heart. Terry’s writing is loving and kind, clever and strong, and he’s written a beautiful and important book, particularly for the moment we are in. It helps lead the way to a more powerful and noble society based on the tenets of love, justice, and respect. He has laid out a process by which we can begin to understand our place in our own families and our society. I’ve worked hard, and I’ve been lucky. Over the years I’ve found some very good guides through that dark forest and down to that river of life. For my wife, Patti, and me, Terrence Real has been one of those guides, and this book is a map through those trees.
Be safe and journey forward, Bruce Springsteen
What a Boss!
If you do decide to buy this book, and I hope you do, might I suggest buying it from your local bookseller? There’s something special about books and actual bookstores and I believe that the people running them are like literary angels. Here’s my favorite local bookseller in Salt Lake City who would love your business and no, I’m not endorsed by them in any way. I just like to celebrate awesomeness.
And just like I celebrate the awesomeness of The Boss, Terry Real, and great books like US and places that sell books, I also celebrate YOUR awesomeness. But you rising up to your potential isn’t just awesome, like let’s give each other a high five and say good job thinking our job is done so we go on our individual way thinking, “I’mna go make myself an ‘I’m Awesome’ tee shirt,” kind of awesome. It’s awesome cuz you becoming your best is what saves the world. It’s true. Regardless of whether or not we have met in person, I believe in you and the amazing potential you have inside to change the world. I know that as you continue to grow into the kind of awesome that you are meant to be, the world will be a better place for it. Changing the world starts with you inching your way toward your best self.
And yes, as humans are all fatally flawed, but like The Boss says, you learning how to accept and navigate your brokenness is the first step to “recognizing and caring for our neighbor with a flawed but full heart.”
And as soon as we transform into an “US,” we discover that just like Alice Walker said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Truly an “US” is what we’ve been waiting for.
My favorite way of practicing the “US” reality is through the transformational practice of Yoga Nidra. Please consider joining my next Yoga Nidra immersion and teacher training happening August 15–28, 2022 where we learn to master the art of facilitating this practice of our Both And Nature, this “US” reality, which is necessary for this world to survive and then to thrive.
My prayer is that we all continue being “a boss” in all that we positively benefit the world and that as we do so, we all wake up to this “US” reality that saves ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world.