So something happened in October. Since then I haven't said much about it. I want to be even-minded about it.

I'll say this: many a time I found myself overwhelmed by the feeling "what have I done to deserve this happiness". It's tongue-in-cheek, I know. It's not about 'deserving'. It's subjectively to me the culmination of practice.

It's not practice, practice, practice and someone rewards me with something because I 'deserve' it. It's practice, practice, practice and the practice itself finally leads to a realization, an awakening that completely shifts the theoretical teachings into reality.

Buddhism plainly teaches a perspective of reality, an enlightened perspective, but being taught that perspective doesn't do anything if it's just intellectual understanding. You can intellectually understand it without going through a fundamental shift in perspective. But from practice, once that fundamental shift is experienced, it's visceral and totally different from the intellectual version. It's emotional.

One landmark in processing the shift that happened in October was the "fear of losing it". I felt I had attained something and was afraid that one day I'd wake up and it would be gone. My feeling was that if I can lose it, then I never genuinely had it. And I did go through a string of . . . "bad days" when I seriously thought I had lost it. I touched something and then lost something.

But then feeling "bad" at a Starbucks on one rainy day of an entire month of rainy days, I realized that I hadn't lost anything. "It" was still here, and "feeling bad" was totally a part of it. When you "get it", that doesn't mean everything is hunky dory, wine and roses bliss here on in.

When you "get it", "feeling bad" is a part of it, and truly understanding the nature of "feeling bad" is a part of "getting it". "Feeling bad" is in the nature of our perceived reality. "Feeling bad" is normal, and there's nothing "wrong" with it. Accept it as it arises and reality has shifted.

Another landmark in processing what happened in October was to wait until it stopped being extraordinary. Wait until I stopped feeling joy that I wondered what I did to deserve it. I'm a human being, I'm living a life; what "realization" is still here when I come down from that high and the stink being an ordinary human being manifests.

I'm still squirming into that skin. It's not uncomfortable. In recent weeks, my life and lifestyle has trended back towards what was ordinary before and I've been watching and observing how I treat that in light of feeling something fundamentally shifted for me.

That's a work in progress, but something definitely has shifted. Something has changed. And some things need to be tested. Interactions with people possibly need to be tested. I'm feeling alcohol consumption might need to be tested, but I'm still feeling out the parameters of that test.

If I were to stop drinking, I'd have to devise a clever theoretical basis to aim towards and accomplish that. I know I can stop by myself with a certain motivation to which I can dedicate myself to stop, but figuring what that is will take cleverness. It's not merely a matter of physiological addiction, although shades of it may have its impact.

The ongoing process involves being confident that I've accomplished or attained something, while at the same time challenging and doubting what I think I've accomplished or attained.

I visited Audrey for the last time in Kaohsiung. She leaves for the U.S. on Wednesday, initially going with just her 5-year old son to find a place in Sedona. Her husband will bring Pie and Gracie to her later this month.

In these few months since she revealed her ordeal to me, we've probably spent more time together than in the almost eight years that I've been in Taiwan.

We haven't been close, cordial at best. But that's been good enough for us to connect in the end and end on a good note.

We spent the sunset hours at a solitary beach she frequented and in which she took solace when she was going through her ordeal. If all of my life were film footage I was editing into a film of my life, scenes at that beach would feature prominently towards the end of it (hopefully the end of the film is still coming soon).

It was a bit other-worldly. The important thing was her taking me to that place. We got there and immediately separated. The place had its own importance to her, but it had its own resonance to me that Audrey doesn't know about, having spent a lot of time at shores myself.

In this current lifetime, we're close; connected. However that closeness has been characterized by distance and pushing away against pulling together. And in the end, in light of our dual, practically simultaneous realizations in October, I think it's a happy end that we end our karma with each other.

The karma that pulled us together is done. The karma that pulled us together potentially held complication. It held attachment. It held us as two distinct beings interacting with each other. That's all done. It's no more.

In being special to each other, we are no longer special to each other. And in the pursuit of enlightenment, it's a good thing to lose attachments and to end karma, even to things that seem materially like good things.