I was just watching a video clip from one of the co-founders of the school where I got my Master’s in Spiritual Psychology. She said something I had heard numerous times in school and still don’t REALLY understand or know how to do, “Healing is the application of loving to the place inside that hurts,” Mary said. What does that mean?#$%$^^#@% I understand in principal but what does that feel like in my body? How do I really do that?
Over the last year I have been witnessing how often I have been a puppet to love, willing to let it “bend me, shape me, anyway you want to, long as you love me, it’s all right.” Well basically that sucks but I am just beginning to witness more fully how I then swing to robot woman. I put up the shield and let nothing penetrate. Good plan except for one tiny detail. When I say nothing penetrates, unfortunately that turns out to include the good stuff. So there I am stuck behind the wall, in frozen mode. No pain but also no joy. Dang it, back to the drawing board.
So my quality this year is inner marriage, putting my relationship with myself first. Well, once I decide that the fact that I often eat out of integrity with my own well being became glaringly obvious- again. After years of failed diets I had kind of surrendered to overweight. Yet, now I can no longer carry the burden of betraying myself. I planned a full frontal assault and have gone on a very restrictive food plan (recognize I will no longer use the dreaded “D” word, die....t). The weight is falling off yet I am being forced to look at my love affair with food, especially sugar. I have had to explore how often I use food as a source of pleasure and comfort. O.K. I don’t feel loved right now, so me and my friend food will go off on a date. YUM!! Sometimes awareness is just a pain in the tush as I am forced to realize that strategy really doesn’t work. So where is pleasure, what really is love? How do we love without attachment?
How easily we are hurt by love. I recognize how often I can be grouchy with loved ones- because I‘m hungry, or scared, or sad or confused. So I lash out or maybe am just not available and I can witness how they seem to take it personally and feel unloved. Now for sure I can tell you I’ve done the reverse a million times. Someone I love is in a bad mood and acts cranky and I feel unloved. Or someone really doesn’t like or love me. So often then I go into robot woman who feels no pain and befriends sugar. Ah, if only it worked. Unzipping the fat suit forces me to feel all this goo. No wonder I armored up in the first place.
I know the answer is to love myself and feel the presence of the Divine within me. Yea, sure, that’s great when I do. Sometimes when someone appears to be unloving I laugh inside or out, at how absurd it is to believe that their feelings determine whether I am loved or not-crazy! I actually own my essence as love. But what about when I just feel a gap, an emptiness, confusion, doubt, fear. I reach for love and it doesn’t reach back. I feel nothing and food isn’t an option. What then?
For now, I can only trust that my internal guidance is on track and that I will emerge from the fog. That something beyond me is shepherding me in the right direction; that what happens is not random but actually supportive of my deepest intention. Sometimes my faith is as flimsy as a feather and I must go on without any handholds. Other times I am as certain as I can possibly be. To allow it all without turning to food, the times when I feel greatly loved and the times when I feel like a castaway, perhaps that is the way to apply loving to the place inside that hurts. Sure wish it felt more tangible.
Lately loving myself has meant subjecting myself to the most horrible gut-wrenching feelings of aloneness. Feeling like I'm going to "DIE!" even though I'm not. Sweets are an easy way out of that predicament, and I can understand why I've used them. Food and sugar is like a distraction sometimes. Without that distraction I have to face what's really going on.
ReplyDeleteHere's the best I can come up with about the Spiritual Psychology dilemma. Since the body heals itself, I think "healing through love" means you accept your pain. That results in two beneficial things primarily: (1) you don't notice it as much, and (2) you stop making it worse. It still hurts while it's healing, but it becomes more of an intermittent (albeit intense!) thing, and at least you're letting the problem work itself out naturally hopefully in the process.
Nathan, Thank you for sharing your vulnerability. I certain know the taste of that aloneness that that feels like death and sugar does seem an easy way out. Yet it is my direct experience that diving into the pain frees me like nothing else. Now that I have tasted the nectar of that liberation, I am like a bull dog on a pork chop, willing, even excited to jump in and totally allow whatever is present, to fully embrace anguish, despair, terror. What I have discovered is that the more I open to the pain, the more I open to joy and love. Turns out they are linked in a way I never understood before. I really appreciate hearing how it is for you.
ReplyDeleteI think it's impossible to love without getting attached. The work is in getting used to the pain of disappointment or abandonment when we don't get what we think we want until eventually it doesn't sting as much.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much Chris for sharing your experience. What seems to work best for me has been finding a way to love myself regardless of what behavior is coming towards me. Then often I can interpret the behavior differently, realizing how it appears to me may be completely different from how the person actually intends it. I might even laugh. Yet when the other person really doesn't care or isn't willing to meet my needs, then the only thing I can do is cuddle up with myself, until, as you say, it doesn't sting so much.
ReplyDeleteI hear you, Savannah, about observing my reaction to others' behavior from a grounded place in myself. And then the challenge to not internalize the experience and use it to fortify the walls I retreat behind when I believe I'm unlovable. Similarly, when I internalize my "positive" experiences with people by using them to feel safe and enhance my self-esteem, I've discovered that I'm not any better off. The truth of the matter always seems to be inside of me, and it's confusing and sometimes scary to pursue something so raw.
ReplyDeleteWhen I feel uncared for I try to look at the ways I'm not caring for myself. Am I being direct about what I want, and not just with another, but with myself? Do I even know what I want? And when I do, am I comfortable with the vulnerability it takes to admit it to myself and then the double whammy of expressing that vulnerability to someone else?
I think it's amazing to recognize that I want to give & receive love. And so I've learned to look more closely at what gets in my way of this connection. And nine times out of ten, I find it's myself that I want love from, not someone else. Which isn't to say I don't want to be loved, because I do and I am, but that the ball is always in my court.
Yes, I really hear what your saying. So many years with me and I still don't really know what's what inside me. I only know that love can't penetrate me until I own it for myself otherwise it just bounces back. The challenge for me is how to respond when someone I care about does something I consider unloving even after I have said it is hurtful. Is the only option retreat? I am noticing how often I have retreated after an experience I perceive as unloving. Yet there is no joy inside the box. How do I respond? Retreat cuts me off. Of course I know I need to love myself yet sometimes that feels like it doesn't begin to match the hole, can't touch the gut dropping terror I feel when someone I love is acting as though I don't matter. I know my mind is going wild and extrapolating like crazy. I just had a situation today. My stomach fell out and I wondered how to speak of it. I committed to not withholding yet couldn't find a way to regain my own internal balance. Turns out the whole thing was a misunderstanding! In the past I would have reacted and set of a whole chain of pain. Here I was able to catch it before it spread. The level of vulnerability feels so intense sometimes, as though rejection could be fatal. What brave souls we are to keep on trudging through the confusion to find ourselves at last. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and vulnerability. It is so delicious for me to explore these inner spaces together.
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