Next: Exploration

Next: Exploration

Much of our pain in life is reinforced by those closest to us.  They say they want to help, but at the same time do not wish to see us in our pain because it triggers them into their pain.  I experienced this when my first wife died.  I was really hurting.

Those who said they wanted to help were uncomfortable with helping because their own buried pain was being projected into their world as fear and those fears were being transfered on to me. Their best efforts to help hurt like hell. They were more afraid of me because of their own fears. As it turned out, not much help. They meant well but were bound up by their own inner workings. They made pointed comments to attempt to lighten the load of my situation and they only served to reinforce my pain.

Life’s Conundrum; How Do I Help Those Who Have Something That Repulses?

What I have found is that if I encourage them -- those people who seem to carry that which repulses them -- to explore into that thing that repulses, whatever it is; the remedy is always held someplace deep in the exploration of their own sense of repulsion. Some times it is a call to action, but most often it is an act of forgiveness. It is in their own sense of pain, hurt and rejection. It is in there some-place, they just have to find it. Sometimes it lay with something hideous that someone or something else is doing, but most often it is a dark place deep inside their soul that has quietly been resting there, sometimes for years, and is now disturbed and kicking up a fuss. With forgiveness, it is not about the other person, thing or happening.  It is about recovering the energy I have invested in protecting me from the world I thought would harm me. Then investing that energy into my own creativity.  I become a co creator with the Creator. Then, finally, giving up the fantasy of how I think things should have been.

Another oddity is that, as they find the resolution and become comfortable with it; they are no longer overpowered by it; whatever it was, seems to lose the quality of repulsion.

This all seems to happen over time.  I have come to believe that time is probably one of the more important factors in this whole process. Time in combination with clear thinking, a sense of safety and the full appreciation of the feelings involved.

They are no longer projecting it out onto the world.

Neil Tubb Zen and the Art of Walking Lightly

Zen and The Way of Things

The Way of Things

There doesn't appear to be a way for me to give someone else what I know. All I can do is help create opportunities whereby they might see “different” for themselves.

When I do attempt to give someone else what I know or what I think I know and then make the fatal mistake of believing I have succeeded in passing on this piece of wisdom, I often discover I have not.  I have often discovered to my own chagrin that by thinking I have succeeded in keeping someone from going through one more private, painful little hell, I haven’t.  And the long run always proves me wrong. That can be disheartening at times.  It seems that it is a universal rule that they have to go through that private, painful, little hell for themselves.  It is as if it were necessary, a rites of passage, part of the ‘deal’ of being here, it needed to be done – it seems as simple as that.

So

The truth of the matter seems to be that each person has to learn ‘it’ for themselves and usually experience it over and over again before the message is ferreted out and understood at the deepest levels of the psyche.

And

They seem to be able to do this better when I have stepped out of the shadow of my good-guy helper role and am just here as a facilitator.

So

It's obvious to me now that many of the problems I have to face in my life are a result of how things were when I was growing up. This seems to be true for just about everybody else too!

It follows then, that my life’s conundrum is:

I am here spending the rest of my life suffering for personality traits I never really asked for.

Where is the justice in that?

Well, there isn't any … is there!

But on the other hand I was never promised justice was I.

So

It seems that healing, health and life style are all really the same thing.

They are all simply habits.  Habits that will, one way or another, develop along the way. Learned as actions and/or reactions that should become involuntary or habitual at some point. Habitual, and hopefully, helpful, towards discerning my life and what to do with it now that I am in the middle of it.

That’s The Theory Anyway! So it seems that there are more complex conundrums to solve as I move deeper into my journey. It seems that I have to overcome my original “involuntaryisms” – habits – the ones that I picked up early in life to save me from a fate that nearly scared me to death.  The ones that helped me originally survive ‘til now.  I still carry them with me and use them daily. Actually I trip over them now more than I use them but they are and were the habits that I really trusted.

Here is the problem: These habits are the ‘grandchildren’ of those habits I used to survive, in the face of overwhelming evidence that I either wouldn’t survive the next few moments or shouldn’t have survived those few moments but did.  These ‘grandchildren’ of my survival traits are all cloaked in a strange aura that seems so inviting and strangely familiar but I am learning that they are dangerous.  They seem to work best only  in my mind.

What I am coming to learn is that when I (do) attempt to put those old habits into practice in reality … they hurt, and cause pain for, both others and me.

But they are so familiar, 

and they are my habit.

Great Obscenity of Life

After The Door[1] There is a Vista.

A Great Obscenity of Life seems to be my insatiable desire to surrender and give over my soul and my sanity to those who would eviscerate me.

I mean why?  But I just keep on doing it!

In my processes of my recovery thus far, I have come to learn that this need of mine to turn my Life and Will over to inappropriate souls is done with a purpose, of course the purpose is twisted but it is there and it is demanding and it drives me at times. 

The Purpose seems to be for me to attain a (false) sense of acceptance and security that I seem to believe that I so desperately need from those around me who have connections to the deeper shadows and ghost of my past.  Not in a conscious form, this is all done under the surface of my conscious mind, but it is working, and seems now that it is constantly at work never taking a holiday.

When I saw this in all its many forms and intricacies and then realized what I was seeing (saw and realized are two different places in my consciousness) fully for the first time, recently, it was as if I stood on a Grand Vista gazing out over eternity and for the first time I could see clearly through the Mysts Of Time. I could see, finally see, the length and breadth of the spiritual journey that lay before me, if I were willing to go through that Door that sits at the center of the Great Hall Of My Awareness and let go of my resistance. 

Finally

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[1]           Originally comes for a vivid mediation and dream that I had persistently during the early 1990’s and I finally penned There Is A Door in 1994, and introduced in my Step Four and Five Guide.