Indivisible Reality
When we say a person has her feet on the ground, we mean rooted in reality, perception unclouded by denial, delusion, illusion, grandiosity, or anxiety, all states that skew our sense of reality. If we can’t even recognise where we are, we will have enormous difficulty in getting where we want to go. It’s a bit like asking Google Maps to take me to „Cologne Cathedral“ and when the prompt comes to submit my current location, I enter „unknown“. Even Artificial Intelligence algorithms are going to have great difficulty in providing accurate directions under such circumstances…
Source
When we operate in hyper-rational mode, those with whom we interact tend to become intimidated, especially if the are less analytically inclined. We appear to them as emotionally cold, even harsh. In doing so, we proliferate a pattern we experienced as children, whereby our feelings and perceptions are discounted and belittled. The tragedy in adult life is that we are now doing this to ourselves, in our own inner dialogue, as well as to others. In the work of our circles, we men begin to transcend this old, ingrained pattern, get in touch with our feelings and – further underneath – our intuition…
Vulnerability
It was all those jagged edges that bewildered and overwhelmed me, that had me on the run almost from the time that I had learned to walk. Now I can see that these were the product of the unexpressed grief, the denial, and the crazy making which characterized the family in which I grew up. There was no one there to hold me with my jagged edges, so I simply covered them over in the hope of avoiding further mutilation. When we hide things from others for long enough, they become hidden from us too. Yet beneath the armour, the wounds continue to ache. And then they begin to fester. Only when the pain becomes intolerable do we cry out for hope.
Dealing With Fear
I have had countless discussions with others in recovery or on the threshold of such an approach. The hallmark question that has emerged from these interactions is: “How safe did you feel while growing up? To my genuine surprise, an overwhelming majority of people answered that they often didn’t feel safe, and then went on to describe aspects of a nebulous state of distress which comprised one or more of the following: danger, risk, peril, threat, hazard, jeopardy, trouble, distress, chaos, unpredictability, instability, vulnerability, violability, etc….
Panic!
How many of us have done this in our own lives? We get hurt, betrayed, lied to, or abandoned, and instead of healing, we obsess on the apparent cause of our suffering. We replay conversations. We wait for apologies that may never come. We try to explain ourselves to people who have already shown us they could never truly listen. We pour our energy into understanding the one who hurt us (so we can better manipulate their thoughts, feelings, and actions) instead of caring for the part of us that has been wounded. The truth is simple, even if uncomfortable: Some people bite because they are in the grip of their fear-driven Saboteurs. Systems driven by fear wound because that’s how they are designed…
Emotional Availability
Part of the original process of suppressing my feelings was the creation of a kind of mélange in which feelings, emotions, beliefs, and interpretations were all mixed up together, leading to confusion, or zero emotional visibility, to borrow a phrase from meteorology.
„I feel neglected“ is not a feeling. It is a belief that we hold. „You are disrespecting me“ is an interpretation. „She’s plain evil“ is a judgement. „You make my life miserable“ is an accusation. „I feel deeply sad“ is, indeed, the expression of a feeling. To make matters even more complicated, the boundaries between me and the other (Mother, Father, sibling, etc.) became fuzzy, so I couldn’t be really sure if that which I was feeling belonged to me or someone else…
Leading Meditation
I like the story about Mother Teresa being once asked by a young journalist to describe her daily prayer and meditation practice.
„I simply sit in silence and pray“, she answered with clarity.
„What do you say?“, asked the journalist, intrigued.
„Oh, I say nothing. I simply listen to God.“ she replied.
„And what does God say? “ asked the journalist, sniffing a sensation…
„God doesn’t say anything, either,“ responded the old nun with a smile. „God simply listens also.“
„If you have never had the experience, nobody can explain it to you,“ she then finished, bowed courteously, and went on her way…
Being „Good“
„A miracle is a shift from fear to love,“ states Marianne Williamson in her commentary on „A Course In Miracles“. That shift, and the awareness of how it can be achieved, is now spreading through recovery communities like wildfire. By recovery communities, I mean the movement originally spawned by a bunch of alcoholics in New York City and Akron, Ohio in the late 1930’s which eventually spread around the world as Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, with membership in the millions, there are over 200 fellowships dealing with the plethora of addictions which plague humanity, such as Workaholism, Food Addiction, Gambling, and most recently, Media Addiction, to mention but a few…
Shyness
Whenever I find myself alone among strangers in a dance class for couples to learn something like foxtrot, a feeling of distress begins to arise, with accelerated heartbeat, increased sweating, and light nausea, such that I generally leave before the real action begins. I console myself with the thoughts of how much I like dancing solo in a crowd, and even with fantasies that, one fine day, a beautiful partner will have sufficient patience and loving kindness to be able and willing to bear with me as I gradually master the moves, the rhythm, and the coordinated steps…
Aloneness
The abused become the abuser. An inability to identify and grieve the losses of our early lives leads to the immense pent-up energies coming out sideways, almost always with destructive consequences. The generational chain is ancient, powerful, and has embedded itself in every cell of our bodies. Thankfully, we are now developing a consciousness and associated healing modalities which is helping us in breaking this chain, for the good of humanity as a whole. For more on this, the Twelve Step Programme of ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics – designed for anybody wishing to recover from growing up in a dysfunctional family) is highly recommended…
