Introduction
“I think God sometimes picks the most unlikely candidates to exercise his ingenuity” – Thomas Keating
Ned: In my early twenties, I reached a point where my anger had come to a boil. It was one of the most frustrating periods in my life. I had made all the checks on my list of achievements I wanted to accomplish. By my early twenties, I owned a house, a vacation property, a vehicle; I was married, my house was full of things that I didn’t want or need and yet, I was still angry.
I wasn’t happy. I thought my happiness was dependent on the next check mark on my list. When I was younger, I thought, “When I get a car, I’ll be happy.” However, the thing about placing our happiness into a future event or object is the object or event cannot produce what we’re looking for. What we’re truly looking for is to be at peace, and our peace is not found outside of our selves.
Making all the checks on my list drove me into depression. I was depressed because what else was is there to life? Thank goodness I made the all the big checks by twenty years old; I feel it was supposed to play out that way. I think it was supposed to because it was my job in this life to wake up. I needed to wake up and find my soul so that I could wake other people up. Because when other people wake up, it wakes me up further. That’s sort of how it works.
A Cry for Help
On one of my darkest days, my depression had come to visit. It wrapped itself around me so tightly that my thoughts were like anchors pulling me into a hopeless abyss. Suicidal thoughts were plaguing my mind, taunting me with the promise of peace if I ended my misery. But my heart knew the reward suicide was offering was an empty promise. I distinctly remember it was that very moment I cried out to God for help. Now, I wasn’t a religious person, nor was I even spiritual. I was an angry twenty-year-old guy, who was trapped in his ego trying to be happy. I was living a much different life back then.
In that moment, I cried to God. I needed help and I didn’t know where to turn. Within a couple of days after making that plea to God— “I need help. Please help me”—my phone rang. It was one of our local doctors. This doctor had been sending nice messages to me through his clients like, “Tell your tattoo guy [me] he did a nice job on your tattoo.” For months there was a setup, by the comments he was sending me. So, when he called, I wasn’t overly surprised. He wanted to bring his nephew for a tattoo with me.
The day he and his nephew came in for the tattoo is one I will never forget. When he arrived, he [the doctor] was behaving like he had drunk three or four pots of coffee. He was bouncing all over my tattoo room, touching stuff, asking a million questions and acting like a weirdo. I start to tattoo his nephew and within a few minutes he was reaching in with his bare hands, rubbing homeopathic ointment on his nephew’s tattoo.
My response was, “What are you doing? You can’t touch my client with your bare hands while I’m tattooing him. You’re a doctor. You should know better.”
I’m shaking my head; I’m like, “Who is this guy? Is this guy really a doctor?”
Seamus: Yes, right.
Ned: During his visit, he was smoking cigars and drinking more coffee from a thermos he’d brought with him. I remember that even though he was acting so strange there was a certain allure to him, something that I was drawn to. At the end of the session, I determined that it would take about two or three more sits to complete his nephew’s tattoo.
He said, “The next time I come in I want your last session of the day.”
I’m thinking, “Okay, why?”
He says, “I want you to come back to my house for some drinks after you tattoo my nephew.”
I was drawn to this man, so his offer piqued my interest. There was something that drew me into agreeing to joining him in his home. As promised, after my next session with his nephew, I followed him back to his house. Now I’m sitting in the doctor’s kitchen having a beer and he looks at his nephew and he says, “Go get the room ready.”
I don’t know about you, but I thought that was a little strange.
Seamus: Yes, that would raise some red flags.
Ned: My mind is racing. “Get the room ready.” I’m thinking to myself, “The room. Where’s the room? What do you mean, get it ready? What’s there to get ready?” All these thoughts were coursing through my mind, but I was able to let it all go when a comforting thought came to me: “I’m a redneck. If he tries anything, I’ll make his nose touch his ear.” So, I went along with it.
About fifteen minutes later his nephew comes back and says, “The room’s ready, the room’s ready.”
I’m thinking, “Wow. That was a long time.”
Next, the doctor led me into the living room and, with a grin on his face, he points to the door and says, “You first.”
Seamus: He’s telling you to go in first?
Ned: Yes, he’s like, “You first.”
Seamus: Okay. That would make most people a bit uncomfortable.
Ned: It was weird. This entire encounter sort of prefaced my friendship with the doctor. It was a very strange encounter but a very deep one.
Back to the story. I say, “Whatever.” I opened the door and all I could see was a glow of black lights. Behind the door was a set of stairs leading to the basement. When I looked down the stairs I could see lava lamps, records, CDs and solar systems hanging off the ceiling. It was a hippie psychedelic room.
Once I was down there for a few minutes I was able to let my guard down. I realized he was harmless and was just messing with me.
That night we all got rip-roaring drunk, but at the climax of the evening, he made his way across the room and was poking me in the chest while yelling in my face, “Are you ready to die for what you believe in?”
I pushed him off me and said, “What is wrong with you? You’re on glue.”
At that, he let out a huge laugh. He found his own behaviour wildly amusing. I also think he liked pushing my buttons. We both started laughing hysterically and shortly thereafter, the night concluded.
This is where the story kind of goes a little dark.
About a week or so later, I’m alone with my thoughts and I feel like a dark cloud has come back over me. I was feeling suicidal again. I had reached a point in my life where I wasn’t happy. I wanted to find something that was going to make me feel complete. I wanted to know my purpose. I was tired of the life I was living; something had to change. I decided to get on my motorcycle and go for a ride.
I jumped on my bike and found myself driving it around the CAMI automotive plant in Ingersoll, Ontario. I’m thinking to myself, “There is a brick wall at the end of the road. I’m going to drive my bike right into it.” I speed up and I’m flying at the wall. Then, in that moment, the doctor’s words started pouring into my mind. He had said things to me that night in the hippie psychedelic room, things that I didn’t understand. He used words like duality and said that we are androgynous. He talked about the nature of our spirit and soul—all kinds of things that I knew nothing about. In that moment, while I was speeding toward the brick wall, I knew the doctor had something for me.
I also knew what I had to do. It wasn’t like I thought about what I needed to do. In my heart of hearts, I just knew: I had to go to his house. Instead of hitting the brick wall I backed off the throttle. I turned a corner and drove straight to 20 Ridge Road. A few moments later I was on his porch. I remember standing there for a moment; it was a very compromising position for me.
I was twenty years old. I thought I was this cool tattoo guy, and yet here I was crying on this man’s porch, feeling like I wasn’t worth anything and maybe the world would be better without me in it. However, my soul and my heart understood what I had to do: “Push the button. Ring the doorbell!”
So I did. I rang the doorbell and the doctor came to the door. Luckily for me he was home. However, I didn’t get the response I was looking for. He looked at me and he said, “What do you want?”
I said, “I want what you have. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I need help. Will you help me?”
When I look back at that, in hindsight, those were the perfect words to say, to initiate the friendship that was going to ensue between the doctor and me.
He said, “I guess you’d better come in. Let’s talk about that.”
He took me back down to the hippie psychedelic room in his basement and talked me off the ledge and then, the next thing you know, he went into a closet and he motioned for me to come over. The closet was packed with milk crates full of books. We started shuffling through all the crates and he dug out about a dozen books. There sat a huge stack of books on the table and he said, “I want you to take these books home and read them.”
I was looking at him like it was an impossible task. At that point in my life I’d never read an entire book. Maybe Charlotte’s Web when I was in public school. So now I’m looking at this stack of books and thinking, “Holy crap. That’s a very large stack of books.”
In the moment, he gave me an ultimatum. He said, “If you don’t read the books, consider them a gift, but don’t bother coming back. But if you do read these books, come back and we’ll talk about them—and be sure to have some questions to ask.”
I swooped up the big stack of books in my arms, and as I was leaving his house I’m thinking to myself, “This is my opportunity. This is my point of awakening. This is my time.” There was something about that moment of taking those books out of that man’s house that represented hope and freedom.
Moments before I rang his doorbell, I was desperate. True desperation is when nothing looks good around you, behind you, and nothing ahead of you looks any better. In that moment I was desperate.
For whatever reason, this was my point of awakening: the meeting of this doctor.
I read the books in record time. Even though I didn’t understand a lot of what I was reading, I just kept pushing forward, putting book after book in front of me, applying sticky notes with all my questions along the way. I think there were more sticky notes than there were pages.
Before we started this interview, you asked me to share my credentials. I spent eight years with the doctor. He put me through all kinds of psychotherapy, acupuncture, chiropractic. He sent me to see a shaman and we did regression work. That alone was a training. I have healed a great deal of my traumas, allowing me to move beyond a great deal of my personal problems. During my time with the doctor he and I created study groups. We studied and dissected different spiritual texts from various cultures of the world. The doctor and I created workshops that we taught together. I’ve carried forward many of the skills I learned doing that. Over the years I’ve taught meditation and men’s workshops, in Ontario and Western Canada.
I was with the Ishaya monks for eight years. Eventually I took vows and became a monk.
Seamus: For our readers who may be wondering, what is an Ishaya monk?
Ned: Yes. Good question, because it comes up a lot. The Ishaya monks are modern-day monks, a group of ordinary people, really, and they have a teacher leading the way. Their main focus is meditation.
I also took a course on native spirituality, which was an interesting story. After my time with the monks, I decided I was going to go back to school to take psychology, so I went to Western University for a couple of years. I took two years worth of psychology and an English course as well.
Seamus: That brings us to the present. You’ve done a lot in your time since you were twenty years old. There’s been quite a lot that has happened in your career and in terms of the things that you’ve managed to accomplish outside your vocation. That’s just scratching the surface of the things that we’ve just discussed, but beyond that, now you have written a book called Be Love: A Book about Awakening. In the beginning of the book you state right away that it’s not a casual read. What exactly do you mean by that?
Ned: Be Love is the type of book that sets the reader down. What I mean by that is, it’s a book that needs to be contemplated. There are layers of wisdom in the book, and that’s what you’ll find when you sit down and spend some time with it. You could miss a great deal of the knowledge that’s packed into the paragraphs of the book if you don’t take your time to contemplate its deeper meaning.
It’s not a story; it’s not for entertainment. There are entertaining qualities in some parts of the book, but it’s the type of book that will stop you and it will bring up many feelings and thoughts in yourself. I will also bring up some deeper truths that live in your soul. It is a book of reflection and contemplation.
Seamus: Before we move on, I think it’s important to state to the readers that I am not and have never really considered myself to be a religious thinker. I didn’t grow up in that type of household, and so, at face value, if I were to approach this book, it might seem like something that I might not be able to get down with.
But then you realize very quickly that it’s a book that is grounded in logic. In it, you bring up so many examples—like when we get into the mind, which we’ll do here in a moment—that you read the text and then you think to yourself, “That is what happens. That is real. That happens to me on a daily basis.”
Ned: That’s because this book is written about my life. I’ve lived the pages of this book. It’s not just a concept or an idea that I’m introducing. It’s all the things I’ve lived through.
Seamus: We need to discuss a couple of things before we get into the first part, which is about the mind. In our world today, there is an emphasis placed on positive thinking. I think we need to demystify that a little bit. What is your take on whether positive thinking is important for us?
Ned: I think it depends on where you’re at. If you’re in a place where you are feeling suicidal, positive thinking is great, and necessary. In your dark moments, grab anything that will pull you out of the well. As a tool to awaken, though, it doesn’t have enough “juice” to deliver you into to peace. Positive thinking alone doesn’t have the power to actually make a positive change in your life.
When I first started to wake up and realize there’s more to life, I thought I needed to be more positive. That stemmed from something the Ishaya monks told me, which is that about eighty percent of the thoughts coming into your mind are negative. I thought, “Okay, I’m just going to repave all the roads in my mind with better, nicer thoughts, and then I will be okay.” I sorted through my thoughts and I started to replace my negative thoughts with better ones. The problem with that, though, was that I was still stuck in my head. It was a temporary fix. Positive thinking on its own was not something that was going to deliver me into my peace.
Seamus: That seems like something that becomes laborious after a time because you constantly must check with your thoughts, which keeps you stuck in them. That’s what you’re saying, right?
Ned: That’s right. By staying positive, you’re still staying in the realm of your mind. Well, if the statistics are true, eighty percent of our thoughts are negative. When I was told that, I was skeptical. I think that it’s important to be skeptical. We don’t want to be led down the path by anyone. We need to do our own homework. When I was told that eighty percent of our thoughts are negative, I said, “No way. Not mine. Maybe other people are having that experience, but I’m not.”
The Ishayas said, “Okay, watch your thoughts.”
So I did. I took a pencil and paper, and I drew a positive side and a negative side, and I started charting my thoughts, and it blew my mind to learn how many negative thoughts I was having. I did this while I worked in the factory. Perfect place to practice this exercise. Someone would walk by and a thought like, “He cheats on his wife. What a loser.” Another person would walk by and I’d think, “That guy’s a drug addict.” And another: “This guy is such an idiot.” These thoughts were just popping into my head. I couldn’t believe the content and the quality of the thoughts in my mind. I learned that my mind was full of negative thoughts.
Seamus: My next question relates to the emphasis on having a positive attitude or thinking positively: there is also a lot of emphasis on being happy. What are your thoughts on that?
Ned: I don’t think that life is about being happy. I think that happiness is something that arises in certain moments of our life. I also don’t think we are meant to be happy all the time. Not all moments in our lives are happy. To be authentic with the moment you’re in, we need all the range of emotions. It is good to have access to them.
But you’re right, I do feel there is an emphasis on wanting to be happy. People believe that their happiness is going to lead them to peace, but happiness is just an emotion, whereas peace is a solid and stable reality inside our soul. You can’t find peace in an emotion, and that is what people are really seeking through happiness. Your peace comes from getting to know your soul and by living your purpose. I don’t care so much about being happy. I want to be purposeful, and happiness is a by-product of living a purposeful life.
“By the end of your life, you will have made thousands of mistakes. Those mistakes will be easier to live with than one single regret for not following your heart.”