SOL: supportive guidance for healing and awakening

By Joseph Clarke

What is our nature?

What is our purpose?

Why do we struggle?

Why do we suffer?

How do we heal?

SOL offers fresh, engaging insights on these essential questions. Through SOL, you’ll gain a richer appreciation for both why we hurt and how we heal.

SOL is a one-stop shop for healing and awakening. SOL provides spiritual wisdom, practical guidance, and inspirational messages to serve you on the journey of life.

Part 1 is a buffet of spiritual wisdom. You’ll find intriguing, liberating insights about our essential nature, our life’s purpose, our relationship with time, why we suffer, and how we heal our deepest inner wounds.

Part 2 is the SOL Flourishing Program– a series of practical, easy-to-learn methods for feeling better, thinking more clearly, making wiser decisions, and enjoying life more.

Part 3 is called “Be, and Be With, Community.” This section connects you with healing and awakening resources, both globally and locally, by providing you with helpful guidance for finding good matches.

Part 4 is called “The Gift Shop.” Many tours end in the gift shop, and SOL is no different! Here, you’ll discover loose pearls of wisdom, inspirational verses, and other powerful, quotable goodies that will serve you on the healing and awakening paths.

SOL offers comfort, clarity, guidance, and inspiration for the incredible adventure of life. Open SOL and discover your path within!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798823022385

Book preview

© 2024 Joseph Clarke. All rights reserved.

DISCLAIMER: The information and advice contained in this book are based

upon the personal and professional experiences of the author. The publisher

and author are not responsible for any adverse effects resulting from the use

of any of the methods discussed in this book. Proceed with caution and at

your own risk. Consider consulting a medical professional or mental health

professional before undertaking any of the practices described herein.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   02/28/2024

ISBN: 979-8-8230-2239-2 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-2348-1 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-2238-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024903500

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are

models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or

links contained in this book may have changed since publication and

may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those

of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part 1:A Buffet of Spiritual Wisdom

Chapter 1: Our Divine Nature

Chapter 2: Mind and Heart

Chapter 3: The Experience of Time

Chapter 4: Fear and Ego

Chapter 5: Suffering and Healing

Part 2:The SOL Flourishing Program™: Daily Practices for Healing and Awakening

Meditations

Breathwork

Mindfulness Techniques

Harmonizers

Healers

Practices and Antidotes from Part 1

Part 3:Be, and Be With, Community

Websites devoted to healing practices

Healing methods involving physical pressure on the body

Healing methods involving physical movements

Energy healing methods

Sensory therapies

Breathing therapies

Communication therapies

Meditation groups

Supportive discussion groups

Medicine work

Groups organized around particular teachers or teachings

Healing stores

Part 4:The Gift Shop

Loose Pearls

Inspirational Verses

shadowisdom – an ode to the middle way

Epilogue

About the Author

Dedication

for Danielle, Presley, and Annalise

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my family – my beautiful wife, Danielle, my daughters, Presley and Annalise, my parents, Will and Jeanne, my brothers, Don and Matt, their wives, Shayda and Katie, my nephew, nieces, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles.

Thank you to my friends.

Thank you to my clients.

Thank you to my alma maters, and to my teachers and classmates there: American Martyrs School, Loyola High School, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of San Francisco, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Thank you to my employers and my co-workers there, in particular: Legal Services for Prisoners With Children, the Contra Costa County Public Defender, the Santa Clara County Public Defender.

Thank you to my spiritual teachers and guides, including: Dr. Carrie Evenden, Unity Grace, Nina Banday, Kadea Metara, Patricia M. Kidd, Dr. Janet Bailey, Whitney Weiler, Joseph L. Gill, Liliya George, Horacio Alfonso, Gloria Alfonso, Carlos Chavez, Dust Walker, Dave Nelson, Rei Rei, Marcela Alva-Capristan, Eugenia Cardenas, Kathy Cueva, Elivia Melodey, Barbara Goodwin, Alison McLean, Joe Loredo, Kerry Chung, Dale Bach, Emily Swulius, Jason Gandzjuk, and Magdalena Grace.

Thank you to my literary agent, Ariela Wilcox.

Thank you to my book designer, David Davis.

Thank you to Dr. Raj Behl and the oncology team at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, California.

Thank you to Sharp Memorial Hospital’s Volunteer Services program and Integrative and Complementary Medicine program.

Thank you to everyone who provided me feedback on this book, including: Tim Flanagan, Jeanne Clarke, Will Clarke, Don Clarke, Marianne Clarke, Sarah McCarthy, Unity Grace, Riley Foley, Donald Garrard, and Tim Meyer.

Thank you to the many authors, artists, and speakers whose work has influenced and inspired my own. This list includes:

47063.png Eckhart Tolle

47063.png Byron Katie

47063.png John Keats

47063.png Neale Donald Walsch

47063.png Julian Casablancas

47063.png Michael Singer

47063.png Radiohead

47063.png Dr. Joe Dispenza

47063.png Walt Whitman

47063.png Fr. Richard Rohr

47063.png Percy Bysshe Shelley

47063.png Dr. Theresa Bullard

47063.png Emily Dickinson

47063.png The Enneagram Institute

47063.png Dr. David Hawkins

47063.png William Blake

47063.png Helen Schucman

47063.png Baruch Spinoza

47063.png Jim Dethmer

47063.png Jack Johnson

47063.png Jostein Gaarder

47063.png Gaia television

47063.png Lion’s Roar and Buddhadharma magazines

47063.png Ram Dass

47063.png Plato

47063.png Joseph Campbell

47063.png Alan Watts

47063.png Thich Nhat Hanh

47063.png Shunryu Suzuki

47063.png Gerard Manley Hopkins

47063.png Fr. George Berkeley

47063.png Rumi and Coleman Barks

47063.png Culadasa (John Yates, PhD)

47063.png Paramahansa Yogananda

47063.png Nagarjuna

47063.png William Butler Yeats

47063.png Siddhartha Gautama

47063.png Lao Tzu and Stephen Mitchell

47063.png the authors of the Kybalion

47063.png the authors of the Upanishads

47063.png the authors of the Bhagavad Gita

Introduction

Something wasn’t right. Something hadn’t been right for a while.

Over the previous three months, I’d lost almost twenty pounds. I was having night sweats. I was chronically fatigued. My resting heart rate, usually in the 60s, was now in the 90s. When I tried to exercise, I nearly collapsed with exhaustion. Being a generally healthy 29-year-old, none of this seemed normal.

I figured I had mononucleosis or something similar. I kept thinking: I should go to the doctor.

But I was in law school. My final exams were worth 100% of my grade. I didn’t want the doctor to shut me down. I didn’t want to fall behind. So I avoided the doctor and kept plugging away.

I finished my last final exam of the semester, an exam on Evidence law, on the morning of December 15, 2010. Some law school classmates were heading to the bar for a celebratory drink. I told them I was gonna swing by the student health clinic first, but I hoped to join them after. Before the sun went down that day, I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and admitted to the oncology department at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, California.

The next day, I began a regimen of chemotherapy. I would receive five rounds of chemo over the next six months. Because the chemo would decimate my immune system and my blood components, I would be hospitalized each time, for about three weeks, so I could receive the necessary monitoring and blood transfusions.

For those first few days in the hospital, there was nearly constant activity. Friends and family came to visit, and we spent long stretches of time discussing the situation and enjoying each other’s company. Every twenty minutes or so, a hospital staffer came into the room to draw my blood, check my vitals, ask about my condition, adjust my IV, clean the room, bring me a meal. Because there was so much activity around me, I didn’t have much time to dwell on my situation.

A few days into my hospitalization, that moment finally came. My bed had just been changed. My doctor had come by for his daily rounds. My visitors had headed off to breakfast. I was lying comfortably in bed, with nothing to do. I was, for the first time since this all started, alone with my thoughts for a while.

As my thoughts started to gather steam, I sensed an intense fear of death creeping in. It was like an icy tentacle gripping my gut, heart, and throat. My mind surged and swirled with fearful speculation. I knew this form of leukemia was especially lethal. There was a realistic chance I would die in that room. I felt on the verge of panic.

Suddenly, I sensed a presence in the room with me. I didn’t see anything. I just sensed that something protective and friendly was hovering in the room, right above my bed. A sense of calm washed over me. Then, the presence descended into my body. I felt contentment and deep relaxation. Where that creeping, icy tentacle of death-fear had been, I now sensed an unshakeable confidence and optimism. I’m going to be okay, I thought. No matter what happens, whether I suffer or not, whether I die or not, I’m completely okay.

Being a law student, I would usually respond to such a grand claim with skepticism and argument. Being an atheist, I was inclined to dismiss this bizarre experience as a hallucination or mental projection.

But I sensed to my core that this was something different. It didn’t feel like someone was assuring me I was okay. It felt like I knew I was okay. Really, it felt like I remembered I was okay. It was like a guardian angel had entered my body and unlocked this liberating memory within me. The chilly death-fear didn’t return for the duration of my treatment.

During my time in the hospital, there was another event that, in hindsight, was an early step on my spiritual journey. Once my treatment settled into a routine, I found myself with a lot of free time. One way I filled the time was reading.

Before law school, I had been an avid reader of literature. Since law school had started, I’d done very little literary reading – I was simply too burned out from all the homework. Now I found myself with a wealth of reading options, thanks to generous gifts from friends and family. One gift was Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth.

I started the book unsure what to expect. Over the first few pages, I rolled my eyes at what felt like spiritual fluff and wishful thinking.

As I kept reading, something began to shift within me. I sensed my mind becoming broader, more spacious, more light, airy, and open. I was, to put it briefly, aware that I was aware.

I’d always been cerebral by nature. I spent a lot of time in my head with my thoughts. But rare was the moment when I consciously realized I was in the act of thinking. Rarely had I recognized, in real-time – I’m thinking right now! I’d always just been in the thought, and then out of it.

As I read Tolle, I realized that, by remaining mindful, I could be simultaneously immersed in the flow of events and aware of the flow’s occurrence. In other words: I could engage in tasks while remaining peripherally aware I was doing so.

As I began practicing some of the book’s mindfulness techniques, I realized that I could access this dynamic state of awareness any time. I could stop fixating on the content of thoughts and fall back into a broader perspective, from which I could observe thoughts arising and passing away, like so many bubbles on a river. Observing my thoughts this way, I was less entranced by them, and less carried away by their agendas. I could recognize thoughts for what they were and make choices for myself.

I remember practicing mindfulness in the hospital shower. Normally my showers were a half-remembered blur of scrubbing, bubbles, and random passing thoughts. Now I slowed down and focused on what was unfolding. Soaping my arms. Ahhh. Shampooing my hair. I focused on the physical sensations. Toweling off. I tracked the process from end-to-end. It was as astounding as it was obvious: I enjoyed showering so much more when I focused on the act of showering!

I teemed with excitement. How might this new outlook transform my life? How might mindfulness reduce my anxiety and my suffering? What are the limits of mindfulness practice? I felt eager to get out of the hospital and to see how mindful awareness could change my life for the better.

When I left the hospital in May 2011, having completed the fifth-and-final round of chemo, I looked for opportunities to cultivate mindfulness in my life. I joined the Berkeley Law mindfulness club, which met regularly for group meditations, qigong, guest speakers, and discussions about mindfulness practice. These group sessions took my mindfulness practice to a new level. I achieved states of calmness and clarity beyond what I’d thought possible.

I also began looking for ways to practice mindfulness outside of the group sessions. I developed a list of simple mindfulness practices I could do on-the-go. Some of the early ones included: recognizing thoughts in action; engaging my five senses; being aware of my surroundings; acknowledging my feelings; narrating my current activity; and letting stress and worry go. I collected these helpful reminders into a Google Slides presentation that I periodically reviewed. As I practiced these and other techniques consistently over time, I became more present and aware throughout the day, my thinking was clearer, and I generally felt better.

After graduating from law school and passing the bar exam in 2013, I was hired as an attorney at the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office. During that time, I continued to practice mindfulness. I meditated regularly. I continued to develop and incorporate new mindfulness techniques. When I began to feel stressed or burned out, I’d lean on my mindfulness practices for healing and guidance.

While mindfulness was a remarkable new development in my life, in many ways, leukemia hadn’t changed me. Before getting sick, I’d been a workaholic: I chronically overworked myself, and I used work as an escape from relationships and emotions. I would treat stress as fuel and push myself to keep working through fatigue and frustration.

Thanks to mindfulness, I was now better at both recognizing stress and cultivating calmness. Despite those improvements, I still routinely found myself backsliding into hustle-and-grind mode. I was still a workaholic. I was, in many ways, just as unmindful as I’d always been.

However, there was one big difference that began to emerge, a difference that signaled a major shift was underway: my body started fighting back.

I had been repressing my emotions for as long as I could remember. I had made a habit of shoving difficult thoughts and feelings down, to keep the windshield of my conscious mind clear from confusion and distraction. Regrets, fears, curiosities, worries, uncertainties, longings, bursts of enthusiasm – if I wasn’t in the mood to deal with them, I shunted them out of my mind and into my body, like I was redirecting sewage or runoff.

The short-term benefits were a clearer head, tamer emotions, and a sense that all was good, or at least good enough.

The long-term effect was a body riddled with years of pent-up pain, confusion, and resentment. When those repressed feelings tried to surface, I kept shoving them back down. I kept forcing my body to quarantine the thoughts and emotions my mind wanted to avoid.

Of course, the quarantine was only an illusion. The repressed thoughts and feelings always found ways to express themselves: they emerged in outbursts of rage, contempt, disregard, infatuation, bingeing, self-loathing, dishonesty, and other destructive forms. I usually didn’t recognize the connection between my repression and these outbursts. And in the rare moments when I did, I usually felt so overwhelmed with guilt, shame, and confusion that I shoved my thoughts and feelings down again, keeping myself blind to the insights and lessons that could set me free from this vicious and destructive cycle.

Eventually, my body had enough. It was done being a landfill for my unwanted emotions. My body turned the tables and began flooding my mind with all of the thoughts and feelings I had been shoving down.

The reversal began in my heart.

In late June of 2013, a few days before starting my job at the Santa Clara County Public Defender, I went to urgent care for chest pains, and I was eventually admitted to the hospital. The tests came back normal and I was released. I figured it was nothing serious and carried on.

A few years later, I admitted myself to the hospital again for similar symptoms: it felt like my heart was about to burst, intense pain was radiating into my jaw and limbs, and I felt on the verge of a panic attack. Just as before, the tests came back normal, and I was released. Just as before, I got back into the saddle and kept overworking myself. Looking back, these incidents were like small earthquakes signaling that a volcano was preparing to erupt.

That eruption occurred in late 2018 and early 2019. It didn’t happen in a single day. It unfolded over the course of weeks and months, gradually ramping up in intensity.

I began experiencing upwellings of pain, emotion, memory, and insight. It was like a dam burst in my gut and chest, and everything I’d been stuffing down there was finally pouring out. I felt flooded with confusion, fear, suspense, and excitement. My mind became a dizzying slurry of epiphanies, disturbing impulses, engrossing memories, and disorienting mishmashes of sense and nonsense.

It felt like I was living in a mental and emotional avalanche, which just kept coming, with no end in sight. My shove-it-all-down approach simply couldn’t keep up with the torrent of repressed experiences constantly clamoring for my attention. It was like a rainstorm kept pummeling my windshield faster than my wipers could keep up.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to handle this incessant onslaught. Alcohol and marijuana provided a reprieve. Exercise and other physical activity would temporarily distract me from the avalanche, as did socializing, reading, and watching TV. But any relief was temporary. Eventually the torrent regained momentum, and I was living from moment-to-moment as though I might burst from the overwhelming surges of thoughts and feelings.

The experiences themselves weren’t new. I’d had episodes of panic and overwhelm before. I’d felt mysterious pains and discomfort in my body. I’d had epiphanies, gotten lost in engrossing memories and distracting thoughts. None of that was new.

What was new was the intensity and constancy of it. From the moment I awoke until I went to bed, these difficulties were gushing through me, sometimes so intensely that it took all of my effort to focus even momentarily on anything else. Interspersed among the difficulties were insights and revelations so surprising and profound they left me speechless. The ups and downs were so extreme, sudden, and unpredictable that I seemed to be falling apart. Tearing apart, really. Losing my mind. And maybe my body too.

Fortunately, my wife Danielle had excellent advice. As I explained to her what was going on, she encouraged me to seek the counsel of someone who truly understands these sorts of things. I told her that I’d tried therapy and psychiatry before. She said no – find someone who understands the spiritual side of what you’re going through.

Something clicked. She was right. What I really wanted was to share my experience with someone who could honor it for what it is, and who could offer me support and guidance suitable to my situation. This didn’t