There is only love and the call for love, love and the blocks we hold to love’s coming, love and fear.
When we turn away from the separation that fear engenders and towards the connections which love creates, miracles happen. We see the gifts we are given, the jewels that we fear but that open us up to love, the lessons which lead us to service, to compassion, to responsibility, to kindness, to love.
Going through the fears of other people, the shit that they hold when they hold themselves separate, is always tough, but the only thing that can help us not feel alone and lonely in the face of that shit is staying connected with the love we know flows from creation through us.
The ego wants to slice the bologna, wants to explain why we are a failure unless we hold ourselves to perfection, to rejection, to aloof, to snobbery & disdain, to anger, to fear, to separation. Unless we keep ourselves flagged as broken by them, lashing out, we are not trying hard enough to be special, only saveable by a special relationship which will finally heal us.
Moments when love touches us transcend the darkness, creating connection. As we serve we are served, opening the possibility that we will get back what we give, finding that love shared is love multiplied, expanded into a bigger & deeper pool for us to heal in.
When we get lost in our own pain & suffering, we are lost.
It’s hard to listen to our best self, beyond our lizard brain, because we usually save that wisdom to lay on others rather than engaging it for ourselves, using it to heal beyond fear & separation.
Transcendent is as transcendent does. In a culture where transcendence isn’t seen as possible, where we are supposed to be in control of our assertions, it is very hard to get a “yes,” get an affirmation for transcendence. People want to support you in plodding pain, in fear & separation, not in lifting above, in connection & love.
Yesterday, someone was reading a lot about TBB, maybe someone she met in the ship’s Seattle port call. I poked through the posts they found, just to see what I could learn and found this, from October 2005: ah, so.
Wounded healer is the theme, as it so often is, even when the post covers just one part of that truth.
I prove time and time again that I know how to be wounded, but do I still know how to be a healer? My pretty clothes are my work clothes, vestments of my calling, but when that calling is put away because it doesn’t return what I need, so is my grace.
Healing is hard. It demands that we walk away from comforting fears & separations, face facts and learn to make new choices based on our connection and our personal responsibility.
That’s not a lesson most people want to engage. They want comfort, assurance, warmth, want a shortcut to feeling better. They want to fix what they know to be wrong without doing the structural work, and that often means blaming the world for their predicament.
To be more resilient in offering what I have to give to the world, I need to be less frail, less fragile. That means I have to become more embodied, more present and less cerebral, less isolated.
Finding affirmation for this is hard, and I know this because I have been searching for years to find support for performance, for appearance, for presence. People don’t get the joke, find it impossible to support big.
Are we humans living a spiritual life or spirit living a human life? Should we play to protect the flesh from slights or should we play to feed the spirit with adventures & love?
This interplay defined my life.
My kindergarten teacher wanted me to move up because I had the cognitive skills to read well, but the principal denied her request because it was clear I didn’t own my body, couldn’t control it well. This is a sign of trauma, of course, but no one saw that even though all the studies say that kids can’t learn to read until they have physical mastery of coordination. Not normative, but what could they do?
Asserting myself in the world has always happened in spite of my body rather than because of it. I never have been embodied in any way that makes sense to the world. Yet, trying to become embodied at my age, a time when people are learning to separate from their body, is almost impossible to learn, especially without having to dispose of my hard won orientation.
“Hello, I’m Callan, and I am here to help.”
It’s a power position, but one that will get me attacked. People’s reaction to me says much more about who they are than about who I am. When they find me threatening or challenging or difficult because I stir up some feelings about the way life should be, much of the time it’s their “shoulds” that are the problem.
I know that I need to look at the responses to me, to use whatever mirroring I can get to see myself. To get clear, looking deeply at my own choices, getting them pure and effective was important.
Not getting lost or crippled by those responses, though, is vital, no matter how nasty they may be. It is tough, though, to stay open and connected while under attack, especially knowing that you can’t retire to safe space with people who understand, value & mirror you, space that offers respite and healing. Not having a network to rejoice at your stories and affirm your divinity, especially when the flesh feels beaten up, well, that’s hard.
I act from love, but in shadow. I stay in shadow because I know the cost of being in the light where some people feel the need to be confrontational, where it takes a long time & a lot of effort for others to understand and value what I have to offer. How do I stay stable and visible enough to allow the connections, deeply buried behind walls of separation others believe are real, to be exposed?
There is only love and the call for love, love and the blocks we hold to love’s coming, love and fear. I need to be more exposed in the love I give to get the love I need. I need to live more on the side of healing than of pain.
And that is a challenge, especially when you have to do it alone.
Callan 