05/22/2018
“It can be frustrating when we become aware that we’re acting out habitual patterns in our relationships with our friends, lovers, co-workers, and in our families. We want to be seen, recognized, loved, respected, and honored as the unique beings that we are; and we, in turn, want to see, recognize, love, and honor those around us. But then we act in ways that cause us so much shame, regret, embarrassment, hurt feelings, and guilt. Before we know it, we’re speaking in a way that’s unkind, acting in ways that are not compassionate or expressions of our deepest realizations and aspirations. We’re frenetically spinning around to get our needs met, to get more love, defending ourselves, and causing suffering to those around us in the process. What happened? Where did our spiritual practice go? Our awareness? Our peace? Our calm? Our quiet? Our intention to be awake? Our last great spiritual state? Our divine grace?
In speaking with people all around the world over these last years, what I’ve seen time and again is that in the face of this frustration, the most common response is to judge ourselves, to be unkind, to act in ways which are unloving and critical. We are simply unable to tolerate our own neurosis, to pause, to gently hold ourselves and realize that these old patterns of defending and protecting are millions of years old, embedded into the neurobiology of our species.
Carl Jung said that neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. What a profound insight. Rather than attacking and judging ourselves in the face of our habitual reactions, we could just stop for a moment and cultivate a genuine sense of kindness toward ourselves, and a curiosity as to the mystery as it expresses itself in our lives. These patterns originated as creative responses to very precarious situations when we were little ones and, viewed from a developmental perspective, are actually expressions of pure intelligence. The dividing line between the energies of wisdom and the energies of neurosis is not as solid as we might assume. When we were little and the attachment system was activated, we were unable to metabolize the overwhelming fear, instability, groundlessness, and uncertainty around our own survival (sometimes even physical survival). In response, arising out of a tremendously creative intelligence, we came up with these strategies as our best efforts at the time to protect ourselves, to ensure that we made it. What a gift. We could take a moment to be grateful that we were able to access such creativity at the time.
So, yes, some of these strategies now simply need to be updated. We can see that perhaps our survival really isn’t at risk in the face of intense bodily sensations and scary feelings. We can see that it is possible to turn directly into challenging emotions, into the fear that our partner might leave us, into the anxiety around losing our jobs, and into the terror that maybe we really aren’t lovable after all. But most of all, we can be kind to ourselves as we discover and explore these things, and cultivate what the Buddhists call maitri, a sense of true love and care for ourselves, a genuine honoring of the vast intelligence and mystery that we are at our core. For it is out of this ground of love and kindness that authentic transformation will naturally arise, and will organically express itself in a life beyond belief, where we are living with an unimagined sense of gratitude for this precious human opportunity. That the fact that we actually have a body that can feel feelings and experience emotions and can touch another and can look into the eyes of the beloved… that this is actually a true miracle.
And then from this ground of love and kindness toward ourselves, we are then able to be there fully for others, allowing them to be neurotic, to be confused, to be scared, to feel terror in the face of groundlessness; and then by some unknown grace, through your attuned loving presence, they can touch their own fundamental goodness and preciousness. In this way, love then becomes contagious and very organically begins to seed this universe in all directions with its sweet fragrance, emanating right out of the center of your own heart.” -Sounds True
