"But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . ." – The Little Prince
I lay in bed with a hand on my chest, feeling the almost rhythmic beat of my heart (I’ve had a slight, non-harmful arrhythmia, since my early 20s). I listen to the soft pounding coming from inside of me, a change from the normal external tuning.
I feel like my heart is trying to speak to me, but it’s coming through in morse code, or perhaps an ancient language that I once understood, but now has long forgotten.
“What are you trying to tell me?”, I ask and plead at the same time.
My heart just keeps beating. Perhaps a little quicker and louder now, in response to my desperation.
While my mind believes it always has all the answers, a suspicious part of it believes my heart holds a secret. I suspect that once the secret is revealed, it will put an end to all my mind’s suffering and finally quell its endless thirst to know everything. Or at least, this is a lie my mind tells itself, because it really just wants love and safety, but that sounds too vulnerable, too childlike to admit.
The paradox is that I know my heart does hold the key, but my demand that it speak in a language I can understand and fix everything I believe is wrong is exactly what closed the pathway between my mind and heart. I suppose we could also call it fear, which I can feel in the gentle constriction of my neck.
I breathe, realizing I’m in a state of anxiety again. It always sneaks up on me, without my knowing. It’s a learned response to not trust. Not trust in myself, in light, in Love. My anxiety never feels safe. But I’m learning that perhaps, fear is the lie.
I remind myself to relax. That all is well. I am safe in my bed and hear my dog’s sleepy breathing close to me.
I put down my pen and turn off my lamp. I know my heart will speak when it is ready, when I am quiet enough to hear it.
***
The next day as I’m driving, I hear my heart simply say, “I’m right here.”
When we break it down, when we look at it, the darkness… It’s light too.
It’s hard. It feels scary. But when we take the time to look at the darkness (what I’ll define here as fear, forgetfulness, the things we prefer not to look at, the parts of ourselves we don’t like but may call out in others, and the emotions we try to suppress), we find that it’s just light reversed.
Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychotherapist said ““Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
Parts work, shadow work, inner child work… These are all modalities to help us recognize and unravel ourselves from our own darkness. Truly, the darkness is the cage that holds our inner children, children that are screaming at us for attention and love, buried beneath the protections we’ve developed to try to suppress their pain.
Take this for an example:
The other day I was journaling from the part of my own “Internal Punisher”. I know some of you reading this have this part, too. The part of you that will verbally beat you down to a pulp and leave you on the floor for dead… if only you didn’t have a dog and a (very) tiny voice in your head saying “Get up. Go to bed.” At the core, that very shadowy part of me doesn’t want me to feel the unbearable pain of feeling confused, lost, scared, and unlovable which honestly, WAS unbearable for me to feel alone as a child. The difference is that I’m now a safe adult able to be with myself through challenging emotions, and I can sit with these very young emotions that my parents just couldn’t handle when I was small (because my parents were just kids with their own suppressed emotions too). And as I worked with this protecter-firefighter part (to use IFS terminology), the last thing it said to me was, “I’m not bad, I’m not a villain, I’m just trying to keep you safe (from aforementioned emotions).”
This doesn’t make me like or approve of a lot of what is happening in the U.S. But it does keep me from hating the people making some of the decisions, which saves me from feeling the emotion in my body. Actually, it creates some empathy. They’re a bunch of scared kids, unfortunately running the show, yes. But what I know about kids is that punishment doesn’t work. Telling them they’re wrong or bad can make them more defensive/protective (this is true for my shadows too). Understanding helps. Boundaries* help too (my Internal Punisher can still have a say but is not allowed to berate me.). This isn’t the answer, I know. But remember…
Darkness is really just light that’s turned on itself. Fear is Love that’s forgotten its truth. Pain exists only in the places we haven’t allowed the sun to shine. In the end, it’s really all just light.
*Dr. Becky Kennedy recently posted about this. Obviously, its a little different for adult kids, but not that different. “No.” , is still a complete sentence.
Your first mission on earth is to remember, to remember who you really are, overcoming and rising above early childhood conditioning. The second mission is to live life from that place of knowing who you are, the space of expansive love. The third mission is natural, spreading that joy, in whatever way you may choose (there may be no life change at all, just being yourself more) to others humans and beings that inhabit this earth.
It takes consistent, committed effort to move through the dark and reach the light. You can’t just want to heal. You have to choose to heal.
*heal: to make whole , or rather, to return to (remember) wholeness after a period of unconsciousness (forgetfulness).
Many therapies assist in this practice. EMDR works in an almost similar way to psychedelics (So I’ve heard. It’s not a path I have chosen for myself but am somewhat familiar with the research and have heard recounts from several friends.) that does not bypass wounds and fears, but moves through them in a safe and contained way that allows the brain to reprocess memories in healthier fashions. Similarly, IFS helps us understand our (wounded, fearful) parts so they loosen the grip and the higher self can step through and reclaim loving power, as well as your direction in life. Still, the basic principle remains the same…we have to be willing to actively let go of our old stories, programmed beliefs, and negative thoughts*. It’s not going to happen (for most of us) just by praying to get rid of them (believe me, I tried). We have to exert the (free) will to choose it, to choose love over fear, in order to create a new paradigm for ourselves.
*If you feel there is a resistance or block or feeling stuck on your healing journey, I recommend looking at that block, or part wanting you to stay stuck, itself.
When I worked at an addiction treatment center, I remember a staff member there teaching a class. I can’t remember if it was about addiction, fitness (he was a strong, athletic guy), or something else, but I clearly remember him asking, “Do you want to know a new language? Or, do you want to LEARN a new language?” Personally, I’d love to know French. I took several classes on the language in both high school and college. But I never really wanted to learn it, and so I can only recall a few words.
Each of us must honestly ask ourselves this question when embarking on a healing journey. Do we just want to be healed? Or do we want to do the work to heal? We may certainly look like we want to heal when we read all the books, listen to all the podcast, maybe occasionally chat with a therapist or take a workshop (I’m raising my hand here). But sometimes, these are easy and often subconscious ways to bypass actually doing the work. We keep searching for the key to what we’re missing instead of unlocking the potential within ourselves.
Yet let me be clear… choosing to move through and let go beliefs and thoughts we’ve held onto for 10, 20, 30, 40, and even 50+ years is not easy. Personally, I have (somewhat subconsciously) been almost determined to hold on to the belief that I’m not enough, or I’ve just wanted it to be taken away from me without my conscious effort. In the past, I’ve started the process of resisting negative voices in myself and gave up when they got louder, letting the thoughts of failure and imperfections consume me. It wasn’t until an occurrence where my ego led and I overrode a core value, missing an opportunity to experience what I care about most in life*, where I decided “I don’t want to live like this anymore” and I found the strength to not turn back (although there were plenty of falters and half step backs, the determination was just greater).
*This was my proverbial “rock bottom”. It doesn’t just have to be getting a divorce or waking up after a near overdose.
As we move through the dark (here, defined as our pain, wounds, and programmed beliefs), what is necessary to realize, so we can be loving observers as we move through, is that the beliefs and negative stories we hold on to about ourselves are not real. They we given to us each time love was invalidated as a child. If you believe you are a failure, it’s not true, regardless of how many times your mind can conjure examples of how you believe you failed. If you believe you are not enough, it’s not true, no matter how your mind compares yourself to others. Your ego only compares based on a performance value that was given to you and your mind accepted at the time as a way to better fit in to society. Failure is a conjecture of the mind, although it is more likely you’ll miss reaching a goal (or being satisfied by it) if it is not heart aligned or was driven by fear (feelings of unworthiness).
The objective here is not to ignore the thoughts, but to see them clearly: as thoughts. To observe them with the curiosity as a small child observes a leaf on the ground, then continue to keep moving. As emotions come up, the process is similar, we feel them through awareness; not attaching to the emotion, but breathing into it, which allows for it to be witnessed and released. I found parts work extremely helpful in this process, as my mind needed more understanding. In the example above, I could witness the part of my ego that just wanted me to feel better about myself, and the way I could do that was to control how far I could go and push myself. Even though it here it led me to a poor choice, I could see how the part was doing the best it could with what it had learned. I could then insert the compassion of my higher self and reassure the fear (of the part) that I could now love myself unconditionally, empowering myself with the ability to re-take the steering wheel of my life.
The main tool here comes from mindfulness, or being able to witness your experiences and thoughts in the awareness and expanse of love. Love is the answer, my friends. As Rumi said, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Commit to see your wounds (triggers will lead you there), which are essentially any reasons you have for withholding love from yourself. Your ability to insert love into those dark caves is where true healing can occur. From there, you have the opportunity to start believing what you choose to believe (rather than what you were taught to believe).
As you move through the dark, always remember to keep a steady focus on the light. We’re human. Distractions are not only easy, but ingrained in our society and imbedded in our minds. There is not bigger distraction than our fear-based thoughts. Again, see them, be aware of them, get curious about their roles, but don’t allow them to be the center of your attention.
As a gentle reminder, healing, along with commitment, requires patiences. Many protector parts can get defensive when challenged and some suppressed emotions need time (patience is love) before they feel comfortable enough to arise, trusting that YOU’ve got them…you’ve got your inner child, you’ve got you. It’s okay to take a step back. Sometimes nights can be harder than during the day to come back to a place of clarity. Just know, “this too shall pass”.
Ultimately, remember this. YOU ARE A RAY OF LOVE, a ray of consciousness, a ray of light. That is who you truly are. You are not Mike, Alice, Joe, Patricia…so far, you have most likely been playing the role that those characters have been scripted to have by childhood traumas, religious teachings, and other fear-based education. When you realize this, when you come to know this through your fierce dedication to loving yourself, you have the opportunity to insert your conscious (loving) awareness into the human you embody and create a new story for yourself.
I woke up from a dream, or perhaps nightmare is the more accurate word, slightly after 12 am on May 4th.
I was in a war zone. The building we were in was no longer a building, the grey bricks only a few feet high. Sparks, debris, and shrapnel flew freely in.
My mother tried to protect me. She laid her body over mine, a small and slender child. I knew we weren’t safe. That her body, hugging mine, would simply get hit first. It was likely that we would both die. Now or later, I wasn’t sure. At the same time, I felt her love inside the shelter of her body over mine. I felt her desperation, trying to protect her daughter, me. I could tell she knew it was probably hopeless too, but she held onto that sliver of hope. And somehow in that, in her love, I felt safe.
Soldiers walked in over the bricks and through the smoke. And, while I know this is simply how my brain put this together and most likely not how it actually works, they shot at cannons to make them fire off into the distance. They didn’t look at us. Their faces remained ambivalent and frozen. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to protect us, kill us, or just didn’t care. I didn’t know whose side they were on. But that’s kind of how protecter parts work…
*While I’ll use Internal Family Systems language, archetype, identities, etc. can often be interchanged.
It’s kind of hard to see what they’re protecting. Another protector, another defense mechanism, the cynic protecting the anger, the ego, or the exile, the inner child within? I think some, at least the soldiers in my head, just forget. They forget what side they’re on and they just do the job they’ve been programmed to do.
In therapy, we say there are no bad parts. They’ve all learned how to do their job to protect an innocent part when there was no caregiver to protect them or help them feel and experience their emotions, to help the child feel loved even though they were sad, angry, or simply in pain. Even the addictions, even the suicidal thoughts… they’re just trying to protect us from more pain, trying to. make us feel better when we don’t know any other way. Every shadow side has a light side. The inner critic, a cheerleader. The judge, a compassionate leader. On the spiritual side, some teachers and texts simply teach to notice but not attach to the (unhealthy) ego and all its voices of fear. We might not be able to stop the thoughts, but we don’t have to give them our energy (power). When we practice this long enough, the voices of shame, guilt, unworthiness, and hate get quieter, giving us a chance to notice the subtle but ever-present voice of Love.
And so, to further our dream interpretation, I’ll provide a framework. I was taught dream interpretation as a graduate student at Naropa University by Katie Asmus, one of the leaders in the field of wilderness therapy and owner of the Somatic Nature Therapy Institute. She taught me and my cohort that in dreams, a part of us is represented in each person, animal, or even object that stands out. In this view, dreams are symbolic, offering us views into parts of ourselves that are often subconscious in everyday life. I also believe that in dreams, especially nightmares, our psyches are actually helping us play out and process fears so we don’t have to in waking hours. I will add that, even though it’s often hard for me to see, I’ve heard from multiple people that I am often guarded and protective. I rarely see how my fears play out (the voice of it can sound very rational) until after everything (ie, a relationship) has been destroyed.
During the dream, I felt most of my presence in the little girl. My innocence, my unbridled love and joy for the world and other people, was being threatened. And yet…
Stepping into the role of mother, I feel (moving into first person here) a deep, fierce love for the child curled under me. Yet I am also human, so I try to regulate my nervous system, hoping my child doesn’t feel my fear. I know she is a sensitive child, so even if she feels my fear, let her know that she is loved… A sacrificial love, willing to do anything to keep the innocent child alive. But even if we both die, she must know that she is loved. And that will be all that matters.
The soldiers I have, in part, already examined. Yet stepping into their shoes, I feel lifeless. I’m just doing what I’m told, having forgotten what I’m fighting for. I gently sense the presence of the mother and little girl, but I try not to see them. It might make me crack. So I fire bombs. Bombs at other men, who are most likely just like me. I am hopeless. I don’t care if I get hit anymore or die in this war. I’m tired. I just want the war to end.
The cannons and bombs, perhaps, represent my anger. The anger that I actually rarely feel, besides the shame and self-loathing I feel for myself. Maybe I should let it out a little more. Maybe I should defend the little girl. She doesn’t deserve to live in a gray world full of shadows. Blowing things up might not be the answer, but fighting for Love? I’m not sure exactly what that means. How do you fight for Love with Love? Without killing and without dying? But maybe, maybe there is a way…
Ah, I won’t let the darkness of the mind kill the light within.I will protect her from the voices of fear and attack thoughts in her head.This is the Mother’s role.
The almost non-existent building… God, I hope this is my mind. My ego. The structure I’ve created around myself is crumbling. It’s never really protected me anyway. It’s never kept the fear or sadness out. It’s really only made me hate myself and be scared of the world I walk in, the world I’ve made. The walls were always a false sense of protection anyway.
Now that I look back…
The mother and daughter…the fierce loving protector and the innocent child. They are covered in dust and ash. Yet they are otherwise left untouched. But maybe it doesn’t matter, because that little girl knew she was loved. And love is the ultimate protection. She rises.
Beauty Pain: Waking up to the knowledge that life is both beautiful and fragile. It’s seeing the hate and fear, but realizing there is even greater love. It’s the awe and the tears encompassed in the breaths, the limited breaths that mark our beginning and our end, while watching a golden-pink sunset. It’s what you feel both in watching a new life enter the world and a life surrender to death. It’s the lifespan of a dog. It’s the bittersweet feeling of a holiday party full of loved ones- full of love-comes to an end. Its the overwhelming gratitude when a once met friend pays me 8x the amount my book is worth. It’s my sobs seeing god in everyone and everything, even when others do not, and the most innocent being killed. It’s forgotten love. It is the acknowledgement of feeling. It is the acceptance of being human.
So many of us spend so much time rushing and worrying that we miss the beauty of what surrounds us, be it the people, animals, or nature, only to later realize that our time on Mother Earth is limited…which makes life all the more beautiful.
It’s hard to use words to define the term “beauty pain.” Perhaps I described it better in past posts that more so provoked the feeling rather than tried to define it:
Still, I think my older sister said it best in her journal, the few words she wrote in her dying year: “Life is beautiful…even when it’s not.”
Each time I come back to this term, I come to understand what it means to be alive a little more. I come to more deeply know myself.
“What if your ability to feel pain is the most beautiful thing about you?” I scribbled in my journal.
What if?
What if my biggest weakness is actually by biggest strength… my capacity to love? It is in my heightened senses, the depth of my emotions, that makes me so human and so alive. And yet, I feel and have felt so deeply that I have tried to numb my pain and attempted to reject my humanness, claiming my want to leave this planet, with doG (Pacer) always grounding me back.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in the midwest to baby boomer parents, loving but mostly unemotional (outwardly), that I learned to deny pain, thereby rejecting myself. Showing emotions wasn’t really accepted in my family. My mom got laughed at (with me as one of the perpetrators) for crying during a movie. No one was there to tell me that my depth was my power.
Eventually, I learned to carry and hide so much that I learned to fear it, to fear my pain. Honestly, I thought it might kill me if I let myself feel it all.
Yet, maybe…
Maybe I don’t have to fear pain, because pain is just love. Maybe it’s sometimes wrapped in a cloak of fear or tinged with sadness, but it is still love. And maybe my pain, my love, is my gift to the world, because my pain carries my light. In fact, pain is a big part of the reason I chose to practice psychotherapy (what I know call “psychosoul therapy). I didn’t want others to have to feel what I felt. Now I know they both do and they don’t… They just have to accept their pain, because their pain is love and shines a light on “wrongness”, the wrongdoings created from darkness. The worst part of pain is actually resisting feeling it.
(However, I can lessen my pain. Here I realize I’ve used the word “pain” in different ways in my blog – thank you for giving me the space and grace to process and shift. Sometimes, what I mean is really “distress” or “suffering”. What has helped me a great deal is learning to check in with myself when my emotions feel heavy and then bring awareness to the thought I’m thinking. Usually, my thought is far, far away from love. Additionally, I’ve learned to “tap in, tap out”, a great skill for any empath. It’s an amazing gift to tap into someone else’s shoes, but it is neither helpful for the empath or the other person to get stuck in the other person’s energy field. Switching to compassion helps me help others.)
It is my pain that makes me mortal and it has been my fear of pain, my resistance to it, that has kept me from Love. It is Love that makes me immortal. When I resist pain, I resist both my humanity and my divinity. When I accept my pain, when I accept my beauty pain, I accept my humanity and my divinity.
I started forming my shell long ago. A protection against the world. My defense against a false love named fear.
It started pre-memory, I’m sure. Yet innocense left room for possibility. A possibility that turned into defeat. There was no space for my tears.
In high school, on my dresser, I hung up a poem, about a mask.
The mask I wore, but no one could see. They had mistaken it for me.
Eventually, I believed it too. I got lost in the identity of my mask, and left myself behind.
Still, she called to me. The little girl without a voice. But I had forgotten how to listen, my heart, boxed up and tucked away.
My shell turned into armor, and I became untouchable. Disconnected from myself, and all of you, too. No hug could pass through.
I wonder, If someone knew… If someone like me… Would have seen… Would have loved.. Would have said “you’re okay”… “You are meant to be here”… “You are meant to be a light in the dark.”
I wonder, What life would be like, if I had had me. To love me. To instruct me. To give myself a voice.
Yet I know I am exactly where I am meant to be, and the opportunity still exist. To love myself back to the beginning. In the armor and beyond the shell. In the pain and through the fear. To find myself again, and be exactly who I am, innocent, wise, and whole.
******
The two poems on masks have been taped on that dresser for 20 years. TWENTY years! But even before that, I tried to simultaneously mask up and numb out…below is my 7th grade basketball picture, not long before I ended up at Rainbow Babies & Children’s hospital to be treated for anorexia, just before Christmas. Did my smile hide the fading body that didn’t know how to be in this world? It was recently brought to my attention through a podcast, reading, and experience, that empaths and highly sensitive people tend to protect themselves more with their masks than others who are not so sensitive, as it is a survival skill to live in an insensitive world. The painful part is that deep down, they know its a mask…
Reparenting comes in loving each wounded part. For me, because I have worn masks for so long, it took years and years and lots of, unconsciously, re-identifying with my masks, making the journey of letting go quite painful at times. It’s also a re-training. I’ve always felt either armored or weak in my sensitivities but have discovered the strengths of feeling so deeply. I have come to understand that if I tap into the energy inside myself and allow it to be expressed outward, I can both keep other’s energies out and help others feel there emotions while allowing them to de-mask. (Link to part 1 of my 2-part Sensitivities as Superpowers series: https://www.instagram.com/p/C0w0H6RPgd5/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MjJkMmIyYzQxYw==.)
While I can’t physically go back in time and give my younger self “me” to love her, I can mentally and emotionally go back in time while also using my imagination to insert myself in challenging memories. I can still give her/me, what I needed, thereby healing old wounds. In healing, I no longer have to live from a wounded place, but from a place of wholeness.
I never thought I would be “smart enough” to understand the matrix, cyclical time, or quantum physics…yet here I am:
We can’t change the past. The past was a moment in time of material creation that our soul called in for us to experience, either to heal or for joy. Since then, the material, or matter, has changed. Plus, if we physically changed the past, we wouldn’t be existing in the same way we are now, nor do we understand how intricately our lives our connected with others. Personally, I like that I get to write to you right now and express my thoughts in this way… I’m grateful to each person who led me to this moment. So no, as much as we wish we had a time machine to go change what our ego minds would like to call “mistakes”, we can’t (and really, mistakes are just redirections). Where the past does exist is in our minds and it is in our minds that we have the choice and the power to shift how see (perspective) and feel about the past…this may seem miniscule, but this is huge!
Personally, I like to throw love at any pain. It’s easy to do with friends who are in pain, so my suggestion is to step out of the past memory and see it from an outside angle (or lens of spirit). If you were scared, angry, or in pain, can you now see yourself with love? Or, you can imagine inserting your higher self (or inner parent) in the memory, holding yourself through the challenging time?
Now here’s the really cool part…when we insert love into a painful memory, not only do we see it differently…but we see it clearly. (Fear often presents as a veil of illusion that obscures clarity). You might see why the event had to occur as it did, or you might see the lesson you can now apply in the present…and, if the memory was about a decision you felt torn about and feared you made the wrong one, you might actually see how you made the right one!
In summary, by using our presence in the present moment, we can send loving energy back into the past and heal old wounds, thereby affecting the outcome of the future.
Love, my friends and followers, is an extremely powerful force.
(Sometimes I wonder where I’d be now or what level of awareness I would have expanded to if someone like me- an empath with heightened sensitivity for energy, big emotions, and deep thinking- would have been if I would have been given instruction on how to fine tune my gifts rather that expected to fit the assembly line of “memorize this, just believe the book” mold. Within that, I can appreciate and understand how each experience in my life has led me to where I am now, exactly where I’m meant to be.)
A few weeks ago, I had decided to wait on getting a wisdom tooth pulled because of nice weather and already having a mountain day planned (I was supposed to “chill” for 4 days after the procedure). Even though I wasn’t in pain that day, I knew before even leaving the dentist’s office that I had made another decision with my ego.
9 days later (with the next scheduled appointment nearly 2 weeks away) the pain came back in full force, plus a little more—almost unbearable. You probably won’t understand the pain of a toothache (and infection) unless you’ve had it before, but it left me wandering somewhere in the liminal state between conscious and unconscious.
Pain, a Great Teacher, is also warning sign. It asks us to check in with our bodies and our hearts. Not listening results in…more pain, at increased levels.
I had again chosen a mind want out of fear rather than my heart want of a happy, healthy me. If I had gotten my tooth pulled the previous week, my last Autumn and dry mountain of the year would have been completely enjoyable.
Fear left me impatient.
Love does not fear time.
Pain lets me know when I am listening to my ego rather than my heart and soul. Whether physical or mental and emotional, the Great Teacher lets me know when I have chosen to separate from my true self.
I’ve ignored pain almost my whole life.
As a child, pain rarely brought me comfort from my parents, so I desensitized myself to it and learned to deny comfort for myself, too.
But, I don’t want to live in pain anymore. I don’t want to live in separation from who. I. am. I don’t want physical pain or heart pain for these elongated, semi-conscious periods.
I want to heed pain’s warning on the spot. To honor pain’s lessons and allow it to redirect me back to love.
My win on that last mountain?
Calling out my self-judgement and shame before it could grow. Even if I made an ego decision, I would not then let me ego again win in berating me for the choice and causing such pain.
…A final, free-writing journal question: Pain, is there anything else I am not seeing? Anything else you have to teach?
I am not an enemy. I am love in disguise.
Keep coming back Home to yourself. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just let that, Home, be your intention.
Thank you, pain.
(Much more on pain and it’s relationship to death coming soon.)
A Dog and Her Girl 