The Truth About Love E-Book

Conor Creighton

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 282

Beschreibung

We are trained from the youngest of ages to imagine that love is a force outside of ourselves; that if you keep swiping, one day your prince will come; that love is something you have to look for, work for, diet for. The truth is: we are creators of love, not discoverers of love, and until we realise that love comes out of us, rather than to us, we'll never really get it or feel it. Conor Creighton learned this the hard way with a string of tumultuous relationships in his past. That was until, through meditation, he woke up to the powerful force that is self-love and watched as his relationships and the whole world transformed around him. In a unique hybrid of memoir and self-help, here Conor uses his life lessons to help readers wake up to the truth about love. A modern manifesto and spiritual guide to relationships, The Truth About Love makes a daring call to action, showing how to change yourself and the world around you through the courageous act of opening your heart.

Leseprobe

TheTruthAboutLove.

How to really fall in love– with your life andeveryone in it

Conor Creighton

Gill Books

To my teacher S.N. Goenka

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part 1: Me

An Awkward First Date

Broken Heart Repairs

Shame on You

The War on Singles

Part 2: It

What is Love Actually?

The Head vs the Heart

Why we Get Love Wrong

The Fear Matrix

Waking up from the Dream

Are You Ready for Real Love?

Part 3: You

Be Here Now

Your Pain

The One

Why it’s Scary to Love Yourself

How to Fall in Love with Your Life

The Truth

Role-Playing Games

Surrender

Part 4: Them

Love Big, Love Often

Blame Your Parents

Your Soulmates Might be Your Mates

What the Aliens can Teach us about Love

Basic Dating Advice, with no Woo Woo

Sex

Part 5: Us

Love as a Force for Change

Peaceful Revolutions

The Future

How to Actually Love Everyone

Growing Tomatoes on a North-Facing Balcony in Berlin

Copyright

About Gill Books

Part 1Me

AN AWKWARD FIRST DATE

Neem Karoli Baba was an Indian guru. He died in 1973. Like many holy folk, he announced he was going to die and then popped off a day or two later. Throughout his life, he performed miracle after miracle. He appeared in different locations at once. He manifested objects out of thin air. One time he pulled crisp, new money out of a burning fire. He knew things he shouldn’t, what people were thinking, what they’d dreamed the night before, what was really in their heart. He was magical, truly magical.

When newcomers met Neem Karoli Baba for the first time, they’d often break down and cry. Their reaction to seeing him, this simple, bald, chubby Indian guy who wore nothing more than an oversized nappy, and spoke in a kind of nasal sneer, was one of profound emotion, awe and bliss. If you go on YouTube, you’ll find lots of interviews with North American boomers and Indian devotees describing their first encounter with him and, well, if they’d given birth to unicorns in a butterfly meadow beneath a double rainbow, you can’t imagine their words would be as emotional.

Baba didn’t teach very much. His teaching was more of a sense thing. You saw him and you got it. One glimpse and things fell into place. There are lots of people like this on the planet. They have something to them. Something more than words.

When Neem Karoli Baba did use words, however, they were very simple: Love everyone.

Your friends, your family, your neighbours, your workmates, the people you went to school with, your new flame, your old flame, loud people, obnoxious people, boring people, landlords, clampers, spammers: love everyone.

Neem Karoli Baba was an enlightened being who lived not so long ago. By enlightened we mean that he had completed all levels of the game called ‘being a human’. And his advice, after winning the game most of us struggle with every day, wasn’t to buy cryptocurrency or work hard, or avoid carbs and dairy, it was simply to love everyone.

I used to believe that love was something soft. A weak thing. You might believe that too. As a boy growing up in the Irish countryside, I didn’t use the word ‘love’ that often, not with my family, not with my friends, not even with my first girlfriends. ‘You’re great, you’re cool, I like you, you know?’ But ‘I love you’, the actual ‘L bomb’? No, you must be mad.

To be honest, I think I was afraid of love. I was afraid to let it out. How about you? Have you let your love out this lifetime? I’ve dated enough through my twenties and thirties to believe that maybe we’re all a little bit afraid of love. But listen to this: you are made of love.

You are made of love

Right now, wherever you are, if you get quiet and pay close attention, you can feel it rippling inside your body. Now you might call it molecules, or wavelets, or vibrations, or the pulsing creaks and groans of your old bone machine, but you could also call it love. The energy inside you is love.

It’s the effort to stick a pizza in the oven when you’re depressed as hell, the strength to floss your teeth when you’re lonely and thinking Who’s going to kiss this mouth? It’s the power to pick up your phone and text the word SRY. It’s your heart still dutifully pumping blood to your feet and hands, while you torture yourself over your lack of productivity. This is love and it’s not weak, it’s an enormous force.

We are trained from the youngest of ages to imagine that this force is something outside ourselves. One day your prince will come. Keep swiping. Put yourself in the window. Do all your homework and you’ll get a treat. We are conditioned to believe that love is something you have to look for, you have to work for, you have to diet for. Of all the cruel messages our deeply unwell society teaches us, this is the cruellest.

But love is an inside job. We are creators of love, not discoverers of love, and until we realise that love is something that comes out of us, rather than something that comes to us, we’ll never really get it, or feel it, and we’ll never be able to do as Neem Karoli Baba instructed and love everyone.

We’re living in very strange times. There is an anti-love agenda sweeping its way across our planet. You can see it in the way we’re destroying nature. You can see it in the systems that govern us and the people we somehow elect into office. You can see it in our families, our marriages, how we date, how we ghost, how we tend to consume rather than celebrate each other. Thank you – next! You can see it in how we spend our time zoning out, how we are so often disempowered and small, and how we push and torture ourselves towards some twisted, unfair vision of perfection.

Perfectionism is not love. Perfectionism is self-hate in sheep’s clothing.

Love everyone, said an old Indian guru, starting with you.

Love is radical

I’m a teacher. I work one on one with people who have fallen out of love with themselves. I explain to them that it’s not their fault. That we all do it. That there are forces all around us on our social media, in our advertising, our governments and institutions that would deliberately keep us from loving ourselves.

They do this because if we were to love ourselves, and if we were to love everyone, then all these loveless structures would collapse. Do you think there could still be billionaires and starving people on this planet at the same time if this was a planet ruled by love? It’s in the interest of the most powerful, and coincidentally most traumatised, on this planet to keep us disconnected from love.

As people, we are at our most powerful when we are generating love, and at our most disempowered when we’re not.

In an often-cruel society that would have you turn against yourself and everybody around you, the most radical thing you can do is love.

Our society is becoming more compassionate. More and more people are waking up to the powerful force that is love. You might say, Hold up, I don’t see that, but I do. When you learn to switch on your love, you not only feel more love, but you also see more love.

See love in everyone

Neem Karoli Baba said something else. He said ‘See god in everyone.’

I don’t believe in god. My experience of god was through a Catholic upbringing that infected me with so much shame that I used to bite my nails after masturbating. I turned against myself. Love brought me back. So if you want, you can say see god in everyone, but I prefer to say see love in everyone. It’s the force, the goo, the thin, wobbly membrane that binds us all together, and truly understanding and then embracing it is the most radical thing you can do.

We’re building a new society based on kinder, more heart-centred values. If you’ve bought this book, it means you get that too. A new society requires a direction, so:

Love everyone.

Starting with you.

BROKEN HEART REPAIRS

‘Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally.’ —Jiddu Krishnamurti

When I lived in Los Angeles, I had a mechanic. His name was Sergio. Sergio didn’t have his own garage. He did all his operations out of the back of his own car, which was a Toyota Camry with a large taped-up hole in the roof and a passenger door that would never open. If you had to go with him to pick up some part at a garage, you either climbed in through the driver’s door, across his lunchbox and greasy water jug, or head-first through the passenger window.

As you pulled yourself inside, Sergio would whisper instructions: ‘Don’t touch the radio, it’s loose; don’t push your seat back, the hinge came off; don’t breathe too much in that direction, you might blow the motor out from under the trunk.’

Sergio was Mexican, a big man, a head taller than me, who always spoke in whispers, despite the fact that most of his conversations had to compete with the sound of running engines.

And he was a phenomenal mechanic. My car at the time was an old pickup whose parts were slowly coming loose in the same way moons drift away from their planets. Each time I called him because the engine wouldn’t turn, or the radio was smoking, or the bonnet had wedged itself shut, I assumed he was going to arrive with the news that there was nothing to be done, that my truck was truly a goner. And each time, within half an hour or so, he’d breathed another couple of months’ life into it with the sheer force of gaffer tape and determination.

Sergio was busy too. There were times when I called him, and he’d say he couldn’t be there for a week. So Sergio was making OK money. He could have bought a new car. One day, when we were driving to a garage to buy a new battery, I put my drink in the cupholder, only for the whole thing to come off in my hand. Sergio laughed. I asked him, ‘Sergio, why don’t you just get a new car, or at least something more fitting for a mechanic?’ and Sergio said this: ‘This car is like my resumé. It shows that I know a lot about broken vehicles. When people call me with their broken vehicles, they see me driving up in this piece of shit motor and they know Sergio can work with broken vehicles.’ Sergio had experience with fucked-up situations.

No job too big or too small

I work with broken vehicles every day. Our minds are vehicles, and sometimes they get stuck. Sometimes they won’t shut down. Sometimes they careen off the road and into the dirt. Every day, in my role as a spiritual mentor – a term that makes me cringe even to write – I help people get their vehicles started again. I believe, in no uncertain terms, that the only reason I’m able to get them moving again is because I have much personal experience with fucked-up situations. When folks tell me their stories, I think of my own and offer advice based on what worked for me. My relationship history is my resumé. I’ve lost good friends, I spent a solid chunk of my life not really talking to my dad, and I’ve been engaged – rings on fingers – three times.

I hope that when you read this, you’ll think to yourself, OK, Conor’s alright, he has lots of experience with broken vehicles.

The broken vehicle I know best is myself. When I first had the idea for this book, I put that idea in the drawer where I’ve placed so many ideas, concluding that It’s a good one, but you’re hardly qualified to write it. The people who know me – my family, my friends and perhaps even my exes, eye-rolling so hard they might give themselves whiplash – know that I haven’t had a whole lot of ‘successful’ relationships in my life. My love life, my family life and even some of my friendships might just as easily be described as a series of broken things held together by gaffer tape and determination.

To be honest, I’ve always felt a little ashamed by how many relationships I’ve had. As a friend once said to me when I’d come out of one relationship and landed straight into another: ‘Bullets have come out of guns slower than you, Conor.’

But this is the thing: the whole point of any relationship is to create an experience in which you learn something new. If you don’t mind me speaking spiritually – and I think, unless you mistook this book for another, you won’t – life’s lessons are attempts by a loving universe to gently, or in some cases vigorously, wake us up. Waking up means recognising what’s real and what’s not real.

What’s not real?

Your feelings. Your thoughts. Your projections. Your identity. Your shame. Your guilt. Your sense of obligation. Your self-criticism.

What is real?

Awareness and love.

We recognise this when we meditate. The more dedicated you are to the meditation, the more you’ll see. Eventually, if you keep working very hard, you’ll reach a state called Nirvana. In Nirvana, a person basically dies while remaining alive. When you break up with a person, face to face, hearts beating, blood flowing, words coming out of your mouth that you practised but never imagined saying, you are also dying while staying alive. A break-up can be a lot like an out-of-body experience. Or, if you’re a Buddhist, an experience of emptiness.

Blessed are the broken-hearted

‘Form is emptiness and emptiness is form’ is one of the oldest Zen koans. Zen koans can be a real pain in the arse. They sound like the things very clever people say to make less clever people feel miserable. But koans are not supposed to make you think you’re stupid. They’re just supposed to make you think.

All matter – the things we touch, love, caress, rub up against and bruise – is not matter, it’s wavelets and particles, and it is empty. This is the lesson that the loving universe is trying to lead us to.

I think that bears repeating. The universe is loving. Most of the time we don’t recognise this. In the same way that a child doesn’t recognise that when its parents take the lighter out of its hands, it’s not because they’re hateful but because they’re actually full of love. The child wails, screams and its face turns purple, but it can’t see, because it still hasn’t learned the lesson, that its parents are loving.

If you’re wailing and screaming on account of love gone wrong right now, ask yourself, What’s the lesson in it all? How was this experience trying to wake you up? Has a dangerous inflammable object just been taken from your hands, and you seriously want it back again?

Every encounter, every scenario, every experience has been tailor-made for you to wake up through learning something new about yourself.

If you’ve learned something in any relationship, then hasn’t that been a successful relationship?

Relationships are places where we can get wise. And the more dramatic, the more colourful and the more varied and even troubled your relationship history (and by this I’m including every relationship, even the one you have with your neighbour), the more wisdom you’ll have gathered.

Wisdom is in the air around us. It doesn’t belong to you or me, it’s just available for any of us at all times. If you read something on these pages and think, right, that makes sense, then it doesn’t mean you’re smart or I’m smart, it simply means we’re breathing the same air.

Relationships are intense periods of wisdom-gathering. They’re intense because they’re challenging you to heal.

Love is one hell of a ride

In my mid-thirties I somehow ended up in a monastery in northern India. As much as I was curious about Buddhism, the reality of my decision to move there was that I just wanted to get off the dance floor. I was tired. I had been engaged three times in six years. Each break-up was more dramatic than the last. The final one was biblical in its drama: I found myself homeless in the Californian desert, with nothing but the constant purr of a WhatsApp argument to keep me warm at night.

Samsara is a Buddhist term for the wheel of life, the misery loops that we find ourselves in. The misery loop that I’d found myself in in that period was a series of unhappy relationships. I’d come to the decision that I wasn’t able to be in a relationship, that I was so damaged, so dysfunctional that it would be better to just join a monastery and never have to deal with this aspect of my personality again. So that’s what I did.

I loved monastery life. The early-morning bells, the lunchtime dahl, the silence of the meditation hall, punctured by the occasional monk fart. It was peaceful, but there was also something missing. It felt somehow too safe.

Love is risky, because it involves a journey to places that scare us.

Love often reminds me of my old car.

Sergio was a great mechanic. And he was my mechanic for another year or so. In that time he replaced my muffler when the metal overheated and peeled open on a highway. He rebuilt the A/C system after a week of 100°F days had zapped it, and he unpicked the lock on the door when a cheap copied key snapped in half inside it.

But eventually our relationship broke down too. I moved to a housesit on top of a hill near Echo Park. The hill was monstrous. You thought twice before going to the shops. ‘I think you’ll need to find a new mechanic,’ Sergio said to me when he called over. ‘I don’t think my Camry is going to last much longer if it has to go up that hill each time you need me.’

SHAME ON YOU

If your body was a rental unit, and one day you couldn’t feel love, you’d call the super. And the super would arrive, grumpy, the end of a roll-up on his lip, the jingle-jangle of keys around his waist, and he’d take one look at your place and say: ‘Of course you can’t feel the love, your pipes are all blocked up.’

Blocked up with what?

Shame.

Your brain is a highly sophisticated piece of technology with programs that govern who you think you are and how you think you’re doing. And shame is pretty much the nastiest line of coding in there.

When you get to the end of this life, when you finally meet your makers – the celestial geeks of light themselves – sitting in the cocktail bar at the end of the game, and you’re looking around the room and there’s everyone you ever loved and hated, and they’re happy to see you because there were plenty of times when it looked like you might never get this far, that smile on their face is relief.

The makers will appear, proud of you, but also eager to find out what you thought of their game, and they’ll shove a glass of champagne into your still-trembling hands and ask, So how was it? You might want to punch them. You might also want to ask them about certain fish that got away. You might even have a question about a certain glitch you came across a number of lives back – a repeated storyline, an alien sighting, that day the sky was green instead of blue, but at the top of your list of complaints and criticisms will be shame.

‘Really?’, you’ll say, ‘You had to cripple me with that horseshit?’

That horseshit

Shame is actually the worst. The purpose of life is to love yourself just the way you are, and shame is a programming that does the exact opposite. It makes you disgusted by yourself. It makes you want to tear off your own skin. Shame disconnects us from ourselves.

Shame was like my shadow when I was growing up. I was ashamed of the house I grew up in, how it leaked in the rain, how the windows iced over on cold nights, how few gadgets we had in our kitchen. My mother told me recently about how she cried herself to sleep the first few nights we were in that home. As a baby you know when your mother’s crying. As a grown man I still feel I do.

Shame followed me into my first relationships. I remember losing my virginity to an older German woman and not wanting to take off my T-shirt because she was tanned and I was, as I’ve always been, as I always will be, milk-bottle white.

‘I’m kind of cold,’ I said, on that hot July night.

The first few times I had sex I felt ashamed by my performance. How long I’d lasted. The kind of appreciative noises they made or didn’t make. The funny thing is I didn’t really watch porn until I was deep into my twenties. So I had no real sexual references. I was just making it up as I went along. But even without porn actors to compare myself to – and I know you shouldn’t compare yourself to a porn actor because, yes, they’re actors, and lighting and angles can make average things look extraordinary – I was still finding ways to chastise myself.

Shame, your ever-present shadow, meticulously inventing new and better ways to turn you against yourself.

When I look at shame and its consequences in my life, it reads like a series of taglines for movies nobody would ever want to watch.

Bright kid refuses to put his hand up in class for fear of getting it wrong.

Kid is hurt by the lack of any relationship with his father, so he pretends he has no father at all.

Dude is ashamed of his crooked teeth so he stops smiling.

A young man feels shame about his performance in bed so he avoids having sex.

Thirty-year-old doesn’t go home for Christmas because of the shame of being skint around his old friends.

Aspiring meditation teacher is ashamed of appearing different, so he keeps his dream a secret.

Do the same. Write out a list of some of the things you have felt ashamed of and the consequences of indulging that shame. How that shame drove a vicious wedge between you and yourself. Now take the list and tear it up into a million pieces – or better yet, take your top off and burn it in a bin while dancing in circles and (gently) beating your chest.

Write out a list of some of the things you have felt ashamed of and the consequences of indulging that shame.

Accept yourself

When we die, we get a glimpse of this. If you spend any time with the dying, you’ll notice that so much of their fatigue and weariness is related not to their body but to how they treated it over its lifetime. What they didn’t do, what they did do, how they occupied their time with unimportant things that didn’t, because they couldn’t, bring them any of the comfort that they feel is due to them now at the end. All that bitterness, all the holding on, all that gripping to life like it was an oily fish in a bathtub, is a refusal to just admit the following: Nothing you do matters if you’re not doing it with a sense of love for yourself.

When I was growing up, the worst thing you could say about another person was, ‘Oh, him? He loves himself.’ So when it comes to practising love for yourself, we’re flooded with strong counter-reactions. It can feel as unnatural as licking a knife or staring at the sun. But even if it’s not habitual, it is very natural.

So much of the work involves separating the habitual voice from the natural voice in our heads. One tip I’ve learned is this: Habit screams, nature whispers.

Shame is the opposite of acceptance. And I’m going to write this again in the hope that someone who will never read this book might pick it up and land on this page: Shame is the opposite of acceptance.

It’s you, not me

Shame is about other people. It’s not really about you.

Be alone. Deeply alone. Go and walk in some great wooded space, far from the eyes of other people, and you’ll notice as you keep moving that your shame becomes so quiet, you have to call it to you like a stray dog.

When I was seventeen, I spent two months working on a mountaintop in Switzerland. There were days when I saw no one. One weekend, rain cut the valley off from the town and I didn’t see another soul from Friday until Monday.

If you really knew who you are, you would never feel ashamed again.

In that time, my shame receded so far that by Sunday evening I was walking around, chopping wood, organising the larder, in hiking boots and underwear, my milk-bottle skin like a beacon on the hillside, singing De La Soul songs at the top of my voice. I felt like some great translucent, malnourished god of the Alps. Acceptance makes us all feel godlike.

Relationships are doing exactly what they’re designed to do when strangers come together and share their body weirdnesses, their future fears, their particular kinks and their embarrassing dreams, and find that instead of being shamed they are accepted. This is love. You know it when you feel it because acceptance is like a reunion. You come back to all the parts of yourself that you tried to hide for so many years.

Even Buddha ghosted

A good friend of mine fosters dogs. She must have taken in about a dozen different mutts over the years. She’s known at the pound, and they’ll call her at all hours of the night, at weekends and even once at Christmas and say, ‘Twinkles, Fido, Mr Puddles is going to be put down in six hours, would you take him for a month or so?’ She’s not said no yet. The dogs she houses for a month or a few months, until they get a permanent home, are usually furry messes. They piss in her plants, they chew her sofas, they scratch huge holes in the doors, they bark themselves hoarse. One time I didn’t hear from her for five days because her dog had eaten the internet.

‘Don’t you ever get mad?’, I ask her.

‘I can’t get mad’, she says, ‘look what they’ve come from.’

The next time you’re getting mad at yourself, please look where you’ve come from too.

The more complicated your dating history has been, the better for you. This is important to remember. The more tears you’ve cried, the more lonely nights, the more desperate phone calls, desperate conversations and situations where you have found yourself thinking Why does this only happen to me?, the better. It’s all learning. If it’s been gut-wrenchingly difficult then that just means you’ve opted for an advanced course.

So please drop your shame. Even Buddha – who ran away from his family with no explanation to explore spirituality – ghosted someone.

THE WAR ON SINGLES

If your dating pattern is to fall for people in distress, or if you choose people whose love is assured, even if you’re not sure you love them, then just like me, you probably have some dependency issues.

When you’re dependent you need other people to tell you you’re good, in order to feel good. Dependent people are programmed in such a way that they don’t know how to generate enough self-love to sustain themselves, so they need to go out looking for it.

Dependency is not an isolated phenomenon. To be honest, unless you grew up in the wilderness with baby deer and raccoons for playmates, mountains and waterfalls as your teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh and Oprah as your parents, you’re probably dependent. Ours is a dependent society. It’s in our programming. But if this book is anything, it’s a road map to undoing your programming, so let’s look at what happens when you can’t get high off your own supply.

You are enough

Dependency is an addiction, you see, and it’s why most of us don’t enjoy being single for long. Needy singles are the ultimate fish out of water. They are actors without a stage. Extroverts without people. They are you or me when we step out the door and realise we’ve forgotten our phones. They are, for the most part, really confused. And quite often, and this makes it even harder for them, they are really hot.

My dependency has led me into so many relationships that I didn’t really want to be in but was just too lonely to stay away from. Can you relate?

I’ve always felt like I was adrift in the universe, cast away, if I didn’t have at least one person who wanted me. Fievel Mousekewitz in a New York City drainpipe, drenched to the bone, singing ‘Somewhere Out There’, only it’s 30-something me on Facebook chat to anyone who’ll answer my ‘long time no see’ messages.

It was so important for me to know and believe that somewhere out there, somebody was thinking of me. It felt like I could only exist if I also existed in the thoughts of another.

I’ve stayed in touch with many of my old partners, believing that it was a sign of my great diplomacy, but that was a lie. I kept up the contact because it fed a deep desire in me to be wanted. Say my name, say my name, that kind of schtick.

We all have a bit of this, to be fair. We’re all running around looking for other people to do some of the work for us. It’s as if this being a human is just too much for an individual, and we need a life assistant.

It’s made worse by the fact that our society tells us this is how love works. The missing piece of your life is out there, just three swipes or one speed-dating event away. Someone will complete us.

But nobody can do that. They can complement us, they can make us forget, they can throw a clean white sheet over the dusty table that is our relationship with ourselves, but in the end, we need to learn how to complete ourselves. We need to learn how to generate love when nobody else is around to give it to us.

The most powerful gift you have is the ability to do this. Learn to do it, learn to harness your boundless capacity for love and you will change the world.

Welcome the unwelcome

Some years back, I found myself broke and unable to pay my rent. Someone suggested I house-sit. A couple of weeks later I was minding a riverside cottage in the middle of Clare, rent-free on condition that I stayed there for three months and fought off the damp that was slowly sucking the building under. I spent the first days chopping wood, walking in the hills, reading, soaking chickpeas, scraping the labels off used jars and filling them with seeds, the usual country life games.

But by week two, with enough sprouted chickpeas to feed a village, I succumbed to neediness and downloaded a dating app. Perhaps there were no houses in the vicinity, but if I knew anything about the world at large, even if there were no dwellings, there were always single people.

I set the distance to 5km – nothing. Then 10km – still nothing. I set the limit to 50km and matched with a Canadian flight attendant, only to realise the morning after that her location was now Thailand, and that in all probability we’d matched when she was in the sky overhead.

My first response when I knew that my need for love would not be met for the foreseeable was to walk two miles to the petrol station and buy chocolate-covered peanuts and a bottle of wine. My second response was to explore it. This is the best response for any time we recognise something uncomfortable. The way we grow beyond the things that bug us is to dive into them.

Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun, has the most beautiful advice: Welcome the unwelcome.

I credit those few months as being way more transformative than I knew at the time. Being confronted with a worldly problem that couldn’t be solved with worldly solutions meant the only way out was to do nothing. Or, as folks sometimes say, surrender.

I learned to make an effort when it was just me: I’d put more flavour in my stews, I’d light candles in the evening, I’d go on morning walks where I’d come across herons perched on the bank, frozen in time. I’d watch them until my feet were numb in my boots.