Inner Life and Inner Retirement
By Wolfe Zucker

Editor's note: Wolfe Zucker, MSW, is retired from psychiatric hospital work, most ambitions, and his shoe collection. He's perfecting  gardening, napping, and friendships. After time at the Findhorn Community, he's now "focalizing" spirituality workshops for elders. He remains acutely aware that not everything can be learned from writing, reading, or thinking. He's "nowing" along as best he can.

Even after reading Eckhart Tolle, when it comes to surrendering, I am more of a bandit than a Buddha. My editor, who is also my wife, tosses back my first draft and says: "Go deeper. Describe the inner life. Describe freedom. Describe surrender.

Talk from the place of awakening… You can still be funny". She adds happily.

Inner life is joy, it’s not funny. I stay there for a few moments at a time, and I’m too happy to joke or observe humans. I experience “foiblelessness,” though I see you the same.

Over the years, I have been in a state of "heavenly elopement" a few times. Actually, each time I visited the Findhorn Community in Scotland.

After studying with a teacher in Florida, I now know how to get there quicker and without traveling. Yet, I left the teacher. I wasn’t staying in the soul experience. And when I faded out, I was blamed. Not healthy by my standards.

Teachers are wonderful. They hold out the promise and expectation of fulfillment. But other people’s promises are like sending a package in the Mexican mail—it doesn’t arrive or it arrives with pieces missing. I now face the fact that I need to spend my whole life teaching myself.

I know it’s up to me.

Here’s what I found worked to enter a place of inner "retirement."

I accept that I create my own life. I accept tjat all I can change is myself. I accept that my inner place is peaceful. I obtain those few moments by telling myself, "I am now in the place of my inner/higher self." I experience a "click", a few deep breaths, and a real connection to "oneness" and breathing and experiencing and a floating in a place where my mind isn’t working.

Then, plop, gone.

So I start over.

Click, float, think, plop.

The rewards from being in my higher world, however short, stay in my life and memory. That’s the good part. Those moments are more precious than all my time living; they remain. The times at Findhorn where I woke up glowed, waiting to meet people each day with a feeling of awe. What would happen today? What would I learn or teach or experience? I felt sure, complete, and present.

Wisdom, I believe is not “wiseness” but an unconditional state of non-attachment. In my best learning, I surrender a great deal of control. I find that when I go through a crisis, psychologically and/or spiritually, my mental fingernails, which held on to "beliefs," slip off. I am actually tranquil and happier. I am in inner life.

I teach a senior’s class in ultimate values. Sometimes, after we’ve all spoken and meditated, we have slipped into the inner life. How do I know? We sit around smiling at each other at the end of class…and nobody leaves.

My task is identifying this state to the class. Once experienced and replicated, group function changes from "how-to" to "blissful being" in each other’s presence.

For me, the big clicks/shifts I’ve experienced in the last few months have happened because I gave up the lifelong beliefs that ruled me.

Let me give you some examples:

	My lifetime fear is abandonment. But Recently, I "got" that I am sufficient. I see myself living in that altered state of "satisfaction," and I am fine. I don’t need anyone. I appreciate my wife, and I like being with her. I’m not going to suffer if I’m not with her. It would just be a different experience. The clinging ugliness dropped away.
	I experience disappointment with everything. So I am completely disappointed before I start something. In my place of higher awareness I am self-sufficient and nothing in the outside is that powerful to take all hope away (which recalling past disappointments did for me). Something shifted and I knew that all my life was exactly as it had to be so far. Asking to change it was stupid. Going over my pain in therapy was repetitive complaining. I don’t feel that big emotional wham anymore when people don’t meet my past’s unrealistic expectations.
	I am afraid of aloneness. Yet, I moved from Findhorn and rapidly created a whole new community. I did the work of getting out of the house and calling people. That is the reality — not my childhood. I saw now as now. Somehow I didn’t find the past and my stories so interesting.
	Another big magical change: I love dogs. The rescue dogs of my childhood were memories of love, which I blindly pursued a little bit like an addiction. (I was rabid pro-dog and had to protect the underdog). My condo association said no dogs. For months I planned going to an association meeting determined to change their position. Then my teacher said, "Grow up," and I decided I should. I skipped the meeting. I let the dog issue go.

What helps me slip into the inner world? I realize that all I have is the now. I accept that I allowed my now to be shoved around by my past.

I decided, no more. The inner world is better. There I don’t need needs.

Now my mind asks, "What are you going to do with yourself?"

My goal is living in that inner place I enjoyed so much at Findhorn: gentle awareness and lit-up anticipation.

My life is now practicing living in the present. I jerk myself back with a reminder. I tell my "I" that my "soul" is in charge. We wrestle, I win. Am I beaming, glowing, and completely healthy?

No. But I am retiring into the light. It’s my goal for the second half of my life. And I mean going all the way.

Come walk with me.