Estranged from my own heart, it was my little sister, Debs, who first introduced me to him, as his voice uttered, “If we could have hated ourselves into becoming better people, it would have worked by now.”
An American, raised in the rough end of New Haven, and now living in San Francisco, Vinny Ferraro spent much of his wild, unruly younger years in and out of juvenile hall and prison, battling addiction, incarceration and violence, before finding Buddhism.
I was immediately drawn to him, this unlikely meditation teacher covered in tattoos with a tough East Coast drawl, when I first heard and saw him speak, as I sat on the floor one autumn afternoon. He sounded and looked more like a tough guy than a spiritual teacher, as he invited me to stop “muscling up or doubling down… to soften, to come home… to push all in on love.”
In every word he spoke, in spite of its alien nature — there was too much fucking love in it all, I grumbled — I heard deeply felt and lived experience. But how could I drop my guard in this way, as someone conditioned to go into battle, against myself and others?
Vinny seemed to embody all he said, a rare quality for many meditation teachers, who, perhaps rather ironically, often present as either automaton or insincere. This straight-talking, no-nonsense, authentic man spoke of the heart the way I’ve never heard it spoken of before, least of all by a man such as him. He was asking me to soften, to open up to those parts of myself that seem unembraceable.
“It is not only possible,” Vinny urged, “but when people do [embrace those seemingly unembraceable parts], it is consistently bordering on the miraculous. So please, stay in the game.” And with these words, my lips began to tremble and tears welled up. He’d got me.
Even though, in some respects, I’m very different from Vinny — a product of the British middle class, from privilege not deprivation, beneath this apparent privilege, just out of sight, is a second generation Central European Jewish immigrant father who escaped the holocaust by a whisker and an English working class mother a few small steps from poverty, both born of trauma and chaos. Privilege means little in this context, nothing more than an artifice, with me a breath away from Vinny‘s former life of addiction and criminality. We ain’t so different after all.
This might explain why, early on, I renounced much of this artifice, drawn to tough guys not the privileged, toughening up in body and mind, which included lifting the heaviest weights I could, immersing myself in contrarian and rebellious thought and culture — I must have read Camus’ The Rebel a hundred times — and finding inspiration in the self-made, marginalised and dispossessed.
However, even the life of an aspiring member of the British middle class is tough — it certainly was in Thatcher’s Britain — defined by a Hobbesian state of nature, made up of relentless competition and a need to succeed in a fiercely unforgiving environment, where failure is scorned upon, and achievement and success demanded at almost all and any cost, especially in public school and the white collar workplace.
Both these milieus, of the tough guy and the privileged, are defined by a shared ruthless masculinity, where there is little room for weakness. Only strength can be shown. I think perhaps I preferred the former, as it possessed greater authenticity, not pretending to be anything other than what it was, not hiding behind the masks of wealth, status and achievement. And here was Vinny appealing to something deeply foreign in me, suggesting that I show love and tenderness for these exiled parts — the tough guy and the privileged — both of whom must be strong and formidable all the time, and never show fear.
As I sat with him and listened to what he said, I started to feel, at a visceral level in my belly, as it churned, tossed and rumbled, a deep self-hatred. Not only did I feel not good enough, as a man, father, partner, lover, friend, confidant and on, but more than this, I felt flawed in character, broken in mind, bad in heart. These exiled parts, the tough guy and the privileged, had built an armour around me of seeming invincibility, holding contempt for the vulnerable parts, shaming them, demanding they not show themselves, and insisting that if they did, then I was weak and worthless, bad, no good.
They were determined to “hate them out of existence”, Vinny continued, much like the dictator who pursues a policy of killing all his rivals until he can be threatened no more, unable to accept that this is an impossible path, as there will always be another rival, that life in its fundamental impermanence will have it no other way.
The dictator in me believed he was doing the right thing, protecting me at all costs from showing vulnerability and weakness, but what if he were able to understand that his bid to protect, to ensure strength, was no longer needed. Perhaps the opposite was required now, to lean into and embrace those exiled parts of rejection, loss and abandonment?
Vinny urged me to put my hand on my heart, hold it there and feel into what was present… it’s quiet trembling, like a wounded animal unsure of its fate, head bowed. I felt a tightness in my chest, which continued to push outwards, to assert itself, while my throat constricted with fear, dry and raspy, as if pushing the words and feelings down, of anger and dread, lest they explode out of me in a torrent of despair. “Lean in, soften. Can’t feel it, can’t heal it,” his voice went on.
I sighed heavily, as he concluded. “Forgive yourself of everything. Love what is, and love that which doesn’t love what is.”
Fuck, this was an extraordinary sentiment, I realised, in its solicitation to welcome and embrace it all, good and bad, positive and negative, beautiful and ugly.
Vinny was silent now, the room was silent.
And in this moment, which seemed to last a very long time, as if time had almost ceased, I flopped backwards and lay down, flinging my arms over my head and holding my legs up, bent like a baby, feeling fully alive, in the brilliance and brokenness of if all, laughing and crying…
Thank you, Vinny, thank you, I muttered over and over. You’ve one hell of a heart.