DEEPLY AWAKE – A GOOD START
Well, here's a funny thing. I just wrote a nine page entry, and with one errant flick of my finger, it was all gone.
Try again.
I just wanted to say, the entry I put up yesterday bothered me, on many levels, ever since writing it.
Partly it was because I was trying, in a perhaps inappropriately public space, to work out a private issue, a private event, an encounter in which the other player left the field, unwilling to engage. And that felt weird.
But, I was sort of left with this big sack of questions after getting fired. I am allowed to continue to deal with it until I have found resolution. This is how I deal. Further, it is not a secret that this is how I work out stuff someetimes. So be it.
The other thing, the bigger thing, is that I was not being entirely honest, although I really was trying to be. Just couldn't go deep enough. Not ready.
So here I am, to try again.
I understand that there are some key beliefs at play here. I am sad that my blog was deleted, because it was a great study is drilling deep to the core.
But, that work has now been done, so I will wrap up my understanding by telling you a little story.
Sam tends to fiddle fart around when it's time to leave for anywhere. It takes a month for him to put on socks, put on and tie shoes, talk him into a coat. Oh my god, does he piddle around.
And this behavior always filled me with such resentment, after working a twelve hour shift on two hours sleep. Somehow my fatigue just goes unnoticed over here, and the fiddle farting just goes on and on, it seems.
And so it was on Sunday morning. And I could feel that old rage bubble up, feel the cry of “HEY! I have needs here!” catching my breath, filling me with anger, white hot anger.
And then, sitting there watching Sam get ready, I realized that what is causing the trouble in my life, in my living, is not other people's behavior, but my reaction to it. Sam is not trying to express his superiority, his selfishness, his disdain by fiddle farting. He's just fiddle farting. That's all. I can interpret his behavior any way I would like.
So, on Sunday morning, deeply inside the moment, I smiled. I made a joke about something unrelated. And then, in time, I gave Sam a word of encouragement, and sure enough, he was ready much more quickly than usual.
We got home and I was beat. We'd had a very deep, profound discussion, with tears and revelations. And I needed to rest. He then did something he's never done before.
He walked me to my room. He sat me on my bed. And then he reached down, lifted my ankles in one strong, gentle motion, and as I sighed, “Wow, thank you,” he said what I always say to my patients, word for word, and with the same intensity and sincerity I always respond with. He said, “Oh, I am happy to do it.”
The feeling behind those words was intense. It was clear. He was clear. He meant what he said.
It was a revelation. I was pushed to the mattress by the weight of my understanding. I was suddenly feeling the care that I give to others without thought. It felt so good. It was such a blessing. It helped me.
I laid there and laughed and laughed and laughed, my spirit healed of some terminal sadness.
In that moment, he reflected to me the best of me.
Sam is a magical creature, well suited to teaching me in ways I can remember.
I felt love. I felt my love, given so freely to so many sick and busted bodies over the years. I felt the clarity I know, when I do for someone who cannot do for themselves, in a way that they prefer. Wow.
He then went to the living room and tried to start a fire. He could watch me from his seat. He told me that. So I turned my head away, because by that time I was weeping, and I didn't want him to think he'd distressed me. He hadn't. He'd given me a gift far too valuable to not revel in.
I felt me through him. I felt safe, and I understood in those brief moments a few things I had chosen not to appreciate before.
First, that what I have chosen to do to pay the rent and keep the lights on is far more, and I know this, than just task on a task sheet, or a career, or even a vocation. It is an opportunity to give love in its purest form, without condition.
I think that most of my sadness in this life comes down to a malformed belief that “people are unpredictably and sometimes gleefully cruel, and that their cruelty is something that I deserve... if I didn't I wouldn't have received it.”
If someone holds the belief that people, all people, are capable of great acts of unthinking cruelty, they'd probably be afraid of people, really guarded and maybe defensive, not very trusting, and they'd expect kindness to be swept away easily, replaced with punishments and pain.
There are really good reasons for holding onto this belief. Funny how, when deep in the middle of something untrue, you can scan your past and come up with lists and lists of proof for the belief. I can go on and on about the cruelty I've experienced from those who I let into my very guarded heart.
Hmmm.
Well, this changes things.
The funny thing about belief work is that is constantly shifts. It's delicate work. Because, it is absolutely true that some people act in really offensive ways, and they are mean.
But I think maybe my incensed, frightened self, that little one from the past, she interpreted reality with a key belief which at the time reflected her world. As a child, people did seem to take joy in their cruelty, and my preferences were just obscenely violated, daily.
But, poor dear, she made sense of something no one should even have to make sense of. And how she did that, I am still functioning within her attempts to make sense of a frightening and defeating world.
But, see, beliefs are made to do that. They will reflect back to you that which is asserted as true.
It is just as true that I was the recipient of astounding, profound kindnesses growing up. I was seen, I was noticed, I was encouraged and I was celebrated. But these were punctuation marks, not the dialogue. My dialogue, in youth, was a crushing one. The punctuation made it possible to go on.
And now I think it is time to readjust things, so that perhaps the contrast is less severe, and used far more infrequently. Yes, people can be jerks, but that doesn’t mean I need to hide from everyone. It doesn't mean I have to anticipate or even accept barbarism. And it does not mean that when someone is acting in a thoughtless way that they are doing it to hurt me. They're maybe just being thoughtless.
So this is the summary, or the conclusion, to yesterday's entry.
Fired by a friend, given a treasure by my son, wrestling with meaning and significance, and here I am, on the back end of it.
I just have wanted to make sense of the new absence of fear, of angst, of recrimination and desperation. I feel good. I feel hopeful. I feel ready.
I feel ready.
I imagine, sometimes, that these words are seen by some as highly self indulgent, and really beyond appropriate. These are private machinations to which others should not have access.
But I am careful to always tell the truth as I see it. The words you read are deliberate and intentional. I am grateful to have a forum for the discussion of the things with which I have beaten my brains in silently all my life.
I have no idea if anyone examines their lives and themselves as I do. I go on the web and encounter people telling me how to do things, why to do them, but I don't see a lot of people willing to admit that their lives are nothing but an experiment, worth examination and reconfiguration, in this way. That they have just royally fucked up sometimes, missed the point. I am about as raw as I have ever been, still no one's guru, no one's teacher.
And that is how I like it.
We are each our own authority. I read words of very few people who dispense that sort of permission. It's ok to feel like shit, to get down on yourself, to think it's all for naught. I feel this sunny disposition stuff is used by a lot of “lightworkers” as a way to gloss over the meaning, the depth and the profundity of our collective ride here. Some of it is ugly and some of it is scary and some of it is tedious. But it's there. If it weren't there, that'd be one thing. But ugly is there, still. Selfish and cruel and base, they're still there. Better figure out how to get right with these things, I think, instead of pretend they are not there.
I mean, if you are there, totally blissful and completely satisfied, no shadows, no blips, no conflict or worry, desire unufilled or dream unrealized, then good good good. That is so nice.
But often I have been expected to put down or devalue my spiritual work because I am open to the reality of all emotion, all expression, and that saddens me.
The lightworker community has long heard the statement that if you cannot see it, it does not exist. And although this is true, what is also true is that until you no longer see it, it IS there. If it is a shadow, something you have been denying, resisting, it'll find a way in. Has to. Needs to be loved, acknowledged, accepted. There will ome a time when baser experiences are no longer enjoyable or instructive, but until they are gone, they aren't gone. Can we just agree to be honest about this?
I'll end on that note. I see many within our odd community as people whose longing and need for peace and bliss make it really hard to function out there, in the world of men and machine, limitation and loss. This is true also for me.
If we really think we are indestructible, we should be able to face each other, and confidently and with great compassion, travel into the scariest of terrains, honesty.
I will live here in the land of contrasts until I no longer do. I will revel in my feeling bad like I revel in my feeling good. I will love my pain as I love my joy. I will not shy from strong opposition, challenges or difficulties. They're things I put in my path, and to deny them their existence or their impact is an at of self negation.
Neither can I see the outside as anything but objectified communication from the inside. The outside is symbology, the inside is meaning.
I see my year, just passing from me, as one of preparation and readying. And now the door which I closed last year on the 25th is standing, blown from the frame, hanging on by half a hinge. The outside is now beckoning me, and I am neither afraid nor am I experiencing the anticipatory grief I used to pal around with prior to any endeavor.
I write this because I know I am brewing a big one here, and it's interesting to watch. I'm still not there, but I am getting closer.
I no longer believe that people are out to get me.
And that's a good start.
