01 August 2002

"Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains," said Jean Jaques Rousseau. I believe he is right. What has always fascinated me is how we break those chains. In a very real sense that is what my new book Age Power deals with – biochemically, physically and emotionally. Age Power is published on August 22^nd in Britain – soon after elsewhere.

I look on Age Power as a process by which we break Rousseau’s chains - progressively and inexorably. The most exciting passage you ever make, Age Power liberates you from relentless forces of doubt, self criticism, and fear, inherited growing up in an ethos which splits minds from bodies and teaches us not to trust the voice within.

WRONG LADDER
As we grow older, too many of us climb to the top of the ladder only to find it’s leaning against the wrong wall. What’s worse, in the process, we discover we often have lost touch with our dreams. So instead of awakening each morning with the child’s sense of wonderment at what the day ahead will bring, we wake up with a sense of impossibility or with a sense of deep regret over a life that seems to have passed us by.

It is little wonder. Growing older brings each of us face to face with loss, grief, sadness and disappointment. When you’re twenty-five, your whole life lies ahead of you. At thirty-five, you get the first inkling that not all you dreamed of doing and being is likely to materialise. By the time you are fifty, you often begin to look back more than you look forward, to wonder what it’s all about and why so much of life has been painful. After all, you’ve been the good employee, mother, lover, artist, husband. You’ve put as much of yourself as you could into your work and connections with people. Yet something is missing. Maybe you find the rules you played by and the rules by which you have defined yourself are not enough. There’s a great empty gap somewhere. Children have gone or are going. A job is lost. A marriage collapses. Maybe you experience a problem with your health which drugs, prescribed by a well-meaning doctor, can’t shift. Perhaps you have been waiting for something to happen, for someone to come and rescue you from a life-less-than-perfect. Then you wake up one day to find that nobody is there. Even if you have a wonderful marriage and you love your job, sooner or later each of us comes face to face with a sense of isolation and loneliness that seems endemic in being human. Where do we go from here?

LAND OF THE SOUL
Welcome. You have entered the region of the soul – a wide, deep, unchartered terrain which most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. Transformation - the kind of change that leads you progressively towards becoming more and more of who you truly are - is never comfortable. Neither does growth take place smoothly. Age Power is no Walt Disney movie. It asks that take we up the challenge of connecting at the very deepest levels with our own authenticity. In the process we inevitably go through an emotional and spiritual detoxification that can make the bad headache you get when you quit drinking coffee look like a picnic.

Each human being is unique. Like the seed of a plant which has encoded within its genetic material the potential for everything it can become as a full blown flower, each of us comes into the world carrying a package of as yet unrealized potential for health, energy, creativity and joy. It is this physical, psychological and spiritual potential which creates our uniqueness. Age Power is about living that potential to its fullest, and coming into a sense of authentic freedom – the freedom to be just who you are without pretense or apologies. I believe there is no greater freedom in the world.

THE ZEN OF YOU
When the Zen painter uses a brush to represent a leaf on a bamboo shaft, he creates a totally singular stroke – like no other leaf that ever existed. Yet within its uniqueness is encompassed universal beauty and life energy of the highest order. So it is with each of us. Within the individual genetic package which was you when you came into this life, was nestled your very own brand of seedpower - an essential soul energy that encompasses greater physical, creative, and spiritual potential than you could ever hope to realize in ten lifetimes. The more fully seedpower is allowed to unfold, the richer your experience of life becomes. So focussed is the energy of spirit within a tiny seed that it opens and reaches toward the light, regardless of what’s in its way. Once I pulled up a weed growing in my garden to discover within its root a child’s marble that had been crushed out of all recognition by the life force of the growing plant.

A wonderful thing about any little seed is that it doesn’t take much for it to develop into the plant it’s designed to be. Some good rich organic soil, a little rain, and a dose of sunlight. The power and the intelligence that makes growth possible lies not outside of it but within the seed itself. People – you and me and the woman you saw when you left your home this morning – are just like plants. All we need is a good healthy environment which allows our unfolding to take place.

HITCHES AND GLITCHES
The problem is that few of us get it. For as we are unfolding - as we are passing through the superbly orchestrated phases of our physical and spiritual development - more often than not our environment does not provide the rich soil, clean water and sunlight we need for full unfolding. More often than not it truncates our development. Then, like a little plant trying to grow in depleted soil with too little water and not enough light, our psychological and spiritual growth becomes stunted. Like a seedling trying to push through the earth with a stone on top of it, we develop "distortions".

All sorts of things can cause distortions: illnesses, accidents, emotional or physical abuse. Even being raised in a wonderful family if you happen to be a "fish" when the rest of your family are "ducks". Distortions can be physical in nature – a sunken chest or an excess of fat to create a cushion against the harsh world. They can also be emotional, leaving us with a sense that there is something wrong with us, that we cannot rely on our own judgment, that we are unworthy, or incompetent, or guilty, even though we may have no idea why or how. And they can be spiritual.

LIFE IN THE DESERT
When we grow up in a terrain in which our own brand of seedpower can’t flourish - when we feel ourselves to be isolated and living in the boxed up world of only five senses, when we think we need to follow other peoples rules in order to find out how to love – then we can end up experiencing discouragement or despair. It can seem as though we have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no purpose in remaining alive. Such feelings are common in the wide population as they age. They develop through all sorts of causes. The most common fall into three categories: our parental training, our religious training, and our restricted world-view. It begins when we are kids. We grow up trying to conform to our parent’s expectations. We have to. We need their love and care to survive. We learn that we can have love by being "good".

Seldom does being "good" have much to do with being who you are. It’s usually about being quiet when someone is talking. It’s about using the right fork, or not sucking your thumb or not telling the truth in case what you say offends the neighbors. Such imperatives become encoded within our body and our psyche as though they were major rules by which we should live our lives. We fear if we cannot do this we will not get the love and care we need. That’s how we learn to play roles. One of the great things about growing older is that we have the ability to let go of these roles when we choose to do so. Organized religion does its share of imprisoning too. Some religions have endless lists of do’s and don’Ts Others traffic in fear, based on the notion that our God is the only God.

As we grow older, the outer forms of religion tends to be replaced by a growing awareness of the luminous quality of life and an awesome sense that in some way we are part of it. If we are lucky, as we grow older, we also come to realize that freedom, authenticity, and creative power depend little on the external circumstances in which we find ourselves. Nor need they be limited by age or condition.

ROAD TO FREEDOM
One of the most moving accounts I have ever read of this experience came from a political dissonant imprisoned in a concentration camp in the early forties. It told how he came to experience the true nature of freedom, creativity, and wholeness while living in the most inhumane conditions of physical incarceration imaginable. He reclaimed his freedom in the only way any of us ever will - by coming to live from ever deeper layers of himself. Eventually his soul and his outer personality became authentic echoes of each other. As this happens to each one of us, the distortions we have carried - the false beliefs, destructive parental training, or negative habit patterns formed throughout our lives - fall away. As they do a genuine rejuvenation occurs - emotionally, physically and spiritually. This liberates life energy and shifts the whole way we look upon reality by allowing us simply to be who we are without pretensions or self limiting assumptions to unconsciously block our experience of being fully alive. It leaves us able – if not sooner, then later - to make full use of our potentials. Far too much vitality lies stillborn beneath patterns of addictive behavior, fear, and heavy psychological baggage – the kind of stuff we all carry around with us to thwart our energy and make being who we are hard work.

Beneath whatever physical, emotional, or mental rubbish we accumulate, freedom breathes softly waiting for our call. Embracing it is essential for our fulfillment. This asks that we let go of careless ways of eating and living that degrade our health and distort our thinking. It asks too that we ease our grip on fear and frustrations developed over the years and learn to reassert our trust in our essential self. The wonderful thing about the psyche - like the body – is that given half a chance it too will detoxify itself so life changing creative energy is released. Spiritual detoxification brings a spiritual new life in its wake - one which echoes throughout the whole of your world. It adds the freshness of a child’s vision to the wisdom gained over the years. This combination perennially delights us when we come upon old people whose eyes sparkle.

PSYCHIC DETOX
In addition to all the vitally important biochemistry and nutrition; exercise and leading edge anti-ageing discoveries I explore in Age Power, there are many ways to go about this. Good psychotherapy can help. So can meditation, Feldenkrais, Trager and energy approaches to exercise like tai chi, yoga and marshal arts – provided that they are always taught with a real respect for the spiritual power that underlies them. Autogenic Training is another simple but powerful way of cleansing the psyche of false ideas and emotional rubbish. So are some of the leading edge binaural technologies such as Holosync – forms of electronic meditation - which alter brain functions and foster a greater sense of wholeness and peace.

All these techniques have something in common: When you practice them regularly they not only bring you greater peace and balance. Periodically they also bring to the surface old feelings of discouragement, or depression, frustration or fear. They rise like echoes from the past to be cleared, very much the way physical toxicity rises to the surface when you begin a detox program. It coats your tongue and spoils your breath temporarily. It soon clears and in its wake old stress you may have been carrying most of your life has surfaced and been cleared away. Every time it happens, the easier it becomes to hear the whispers of the soul and to allow the full expression of your seedpower. Personal growth is nothing more than the passage by which we realize who we have been all along, and welcome it.

Leslie